ZAP2IT 'Smallville's' Kreuk Is Doing It for Herself
(Tuesday, May 11 12:44 PM)
By Kate O'Hare

LOS ANGELES (Zap2it.com) - For three seasons now on The WB's "Smallville" -- which concludes its current run on Wednesday, May 19 -- Kristin Kreuk has played Lana Lang, the object of Kansas high-school classmate Clark Kent's (Tom Welling) affections.
Love, though, has yet to blossom fully because Clark cannot reveal to Lana that he's a super-charged alien, one day destined to become Superman. But this year, Kreuk believes that Lana is moving beyond that.

"Her journey this year is great," Kreuk says, taking a break during filming on the show's sets in Vancouver, Canada. "She's on her way to being an independent woman, and I love that. In the beginning of this season, it was all, 'Clark, I will wait for you forever,' blah blah blah. And she's come to a point where she's like, 'Wait a minute, I've got to learn to stand on my own two feet and learn how to live my life on my own and be independent.'

"Clark will leave her, and she knows it. As much as she loves him, she knows it."
In many ways, Kreuk feels that the relationship between Clark and Lana is not a healthy one. "It's just really bad. He hurts her so much, and she does the same thing to him. The fact that he can't trust her and can't share with her, that matters.

"She's the type of person who goes, 'Here's my life, here's everything about me, here I am, accept me or don't.' And she just gives of herself. Clark holds all these things back, so she can't quite understand how someone can do that if they really love somebody."

But what if Clark did tell Lana? "In the comic books, he does," Kreuk says. "Clark tells her when she's ready. Judging from her reaction in the past to Kryptonite freak guys, she'd be accepting. An alien's kind of difficult to comprehend, and she's practical.

"She doesn't look at her friends and go, 'Hey, wonder if they're an alien.' She lives life not thinking about the paranormal. She lives her life thinking about emotional things. I think she'd be relieved -- angry at him for not being able to trust her, but ultimately she'd understand."

In the episode filming on this day, "Talisman" (which aired May 5), Lana has just learned that her business partner, Lex Luthor (Michael Rosenbaum), has put their Egyptian Revival-style coffeehouse, the Talon, up for sale. At the same time, Lana is seriously considering heading to school in Paris. It's one step toward Lana deciding what she wants to be when she grows up.

"I don't think she has any idea," Kreuk says. "I've tried to push people to think about that. She's applying for design school in Paris. With the Talon, she's been doing interior decorating. The Talon, in my opinion, looks horrendous, but on camera it looks really great. But if you're in there, it's overwhelming.

"She's trying to figure out what to do. She's business-oriented; she's a practical girl. The more she's around Lex, the more I see that in her. She looks up to him in a lot of ways. She's trying to find her way. She likes to help people, it's just who she is. That's another thing that's interesting.

"She's like most kids in high school, going 'I don't know!'"