Her 1800s dresses are a far cry from her La Femme Nikita sexy outfits, but she finds a way to be alluring through vampiric transformations. She gets some laughs too, impersonating Sean Connery’s Quartermain. Taking a break from her two-year-old son, who rested in a nearby hotel room, Wilson spent a few minutes discussing her work in the new superhero film.

Shouldn’t this be League of Extraordinary GentlePEOPLE? It doesn’t bother me. I’m the gentle in gentlemen. I don’t mind being referred to as a gentleman. It doesn’t bother me at all.

Did Stuart Townshend give you any advice for playing a vampire? No. I haven’t seen his film. I never saw Queen of the Damned, so I had no idea. But Stuart, I didn’t even see him before we started shooting. He didn’t arrive until we both started to shoot, so there wasn’t really a chance to ask him.

The film’s pretty liberal with the vampire rules though, isn’t it? You stand out in the sunlight, you look in a mirror… Well, there are questions. I brought those questions up. I’m not full vampire. I’m half vampire, half human. Dracula loved me and he spared me and he put enough blood in my vein that I’ve got it in me but it doesn’t overtake me as it does real vampires. It overtakes in moments when I get emotional. The questions about the sunrise, all those things, they’re questions you should ask the director. I addressed them with him and they were sort of a can of worms that we just had to work with.

Did you make your own slurpy noises when you sucked blood? Yeah, absolutely. [Growls]

How did you develop your Sean Connery impression? I was very nervous about that. I called Sean to tell him, “You know, I’m impersonating you in the film but I don’t have to impersonate you. I could just mock you and do it with an English accent. I don’t have to.” And he said, “Well, it depends on how good it is. Let me hear it.” So, I let him hear it and he laughed. Sean commented when he saw the dailies, “Well done. Well done, kid.”

How did you like your costumes? They’re amazing. My costumes really helped me transform from everything that I’d been thinking about and the research I’d done into Mina. They were so fabulous. Great, loved them.

Do you think kids will get all the literature references in the film? Well, if they don’t, their parents will, so I know myself, when I was a kid, [I’d ask], “Mom, what does that mean?” I used to ask my mom all kinds of questions, so hopefully their parents were literary enough that they are aware and they can actually tell the kids the references. [Baz Lurhmann’s] Romeo and Juliet worked, and Shakespeare is not something that’s big in America. In England, it’s in the schools. Maybe if the kids don’t know of it, their parents will be able to tell them that and inform them and they might inquire themselves.

Have you had to fight the action heroine typecast? No. I haven’t. I finished La Femme Nikita. I was offered a big comedy and then a small independent great character set in the ‘40s. So, I had two great options but I was pregnant. I had a baby. So, I’m not finding it at this point. I’m just auditioning and looking at things, reading things, finding things I like. It’s just about a script and whether I’m right for it. I think Nikita was a cult hit, so it hasn’t interfered too much at this point.

Do you feel you’ve been part of the kick-ass girl movement? I think so. I had dinner with Putin, president Putin last year in Russia and that made me feel pretty good because he said to me, “You know that you’ve revolutionized the woman in Russia. You’re a big hero here. Women, they like you because you’re strong.” That’s when I went, “Okay, I’m part of something.”