Mind Games
Her heart's been stolen by the Man of Steel, but Smallville's Kristin Kreuk still wants to be your psychic friend in Earthsea.
WATCHING THE DETECTIVES
After playing Clark Kent's sometime super-squeeze Lana Lang for four seasons on the WB's Smallville, Kristin Kreuk has a confession to make: Before she landed the role, she'd never read a Superman comic. "My parents didn't have comic books in the house, "she says. "We had to do math quizzes instead." But that doesn't mean the Kreuk family was raised to treat geek culture like it was kryptonite. "We only got cable, basically, for Star Trek,: says the 21-year-old actress, whose father is a phaser-carrying Trekkie. "I grew up watching Murder, She Wrote and Matlock. Usued to get so scared that I would run up to the bedroom because I thought someone was going to murder me."
DO YOU BELIEVE IN MAGIC?
In this month's Sci Fi Channel miniseries Earthsea (based on the Ursula K. Le Guin novels), Kreuk is playing a familiar character: a young woman with the hots for a misunderstood hero. She costars as Tenar, a psychic priestess drawn to rebellious wizard Ged (X's Shawn Ashmore), whose careless conjuring endangers their land. Though she claims to possess no mystical abilities of her own, Kreuk isn't ready to dismiss all fortune-tellers as scum artists. "I've been to a palm reader," she says, "mostly because I've got really wrinkly hands. She told me that I have a long lifeline. She said I could speed [while driving] and be all right. I could probably jump off bridges and I wouldn't die."
EVERYBODY KNOWS THIS IS NOWHERE
Unlike her predecessors, Kreuk may be the first WB star who's eager to remain anonymous - an easy demand, since both Smallville and Earthsea are filmed in her hometown of Vancouver. "There's no such thing as a celebrity in Canada," says Kreuk, for whom the city's club scene is a kind of Bizarro World, "I have dinner parties and we drink lots of wine. Nothing too crazy, but when I dance, I go all out." Nor is she completely comfortable living in solitude in a secluded Arctic fortress: "I have a roommate with me right now because it's a big house, and at night with all the rattling, you get kind of spooked." Paging Jessica Fletcher!
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