By Fred Topel | Images property of New Line Cinema.
Nicolette Sheridan goes from soapy TV drama to wild movie comedy in Code Name: The Cleaner. She plays a villainous pursuing a poor janitor who thinks he's a spy. The film still played on her sex appeal, as she attempts to seduce information out of his character by doing a sexy dance in only bra and panties.
Interview: Nicolette Sheridan on Code Name: The Cleaner
"I was petrified," she admitted. "It's horrible having to drop one's robe and having to be exposed in your knickers in front of Cedric and a crew of people, but Cedric was extremely supportive. Yes, he was very supportive. I wasn't sure what I was going to do once I turned on that music and had to dance over to that bed trying to extract information out of the amnesiac. So it was probably about twenty takes of just the craziest dances and Cedric can move like nobody. He is a brother that knows how to dance and I was feeling extremely white after he started busting some moves. So, he'd just get back in the bed and I would do my thing and then he would get up and start imitating what I was doing. We had some pretty wild dances and I think that they settled on a quite tame one."
Why would this be a problem? Doesn't she drop her robes on Desperate Housewives all the time? "Oh, well, first of all, my character Diane in this film is a very straight laced, hardcore, head of security bad ass. So she had to think on her feet in order to try and get this information out of Cedric's character and comes up with this dance, having to seduce him into jogging his memory since supposedly that's what would get him to remember something. So I think that being in character as well as exposing one's self in that way, as big as a Cadillac on the screen was a little intimidating. It's easier when it's a small box even though those screens are getting quite large."
Code Name: The Cleaner
Code Name: The Cleaner
Another scene has Cedric imagine a kung fu brawl between Sheridan and Lucy Liu as a girl on girl bathtub fantasy. "Well, that wasn't in the script initially. Cedric's character Jake has these fantasies throughout the film and close to shooting the fight scene Cedric thought that his male fantasy could come in handy. So he had the producers suggest that we have this bubble bath fantasy, not clothed, luring him into this world of bubbles and Lucy and I thought, 'No. It's not going to happen.' But then on closer examination we thought of a way that it might work, picking the outfits that we wore and finding the humor in it since it is a theme throughout the film, these fantasies. So it would be pretty appropriate to have a fantasy like us in a bubble bath together. So we shot it."
Filming the actual fight scene with Liu let Sheriden show her tough girl skills. "We got together with the stunt coordinator and basically choreographed the fight. Both of have a little foundation in martial arts. We tried to choreograph it in a way that looked very authentic and tough. People had been calling it the cat fight which we just didn't like. It's not a hair pulling, slapping, nail breaking fight. This was combinations and roundhouses and throwing punches and dodging kicks. It was the real deal."
Code Name: The Cleaner opens to theatres on January 5th.
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