PASADENA, Calif. _ A self-confessed "softy," actress Malin Akerman is learning to be more assertive. It's a quality you need in Hollywood, she says on a cool, winter day in the guest room of a hotel here.
Akerman, who was born in Sweden but grew up in Canada, is testing her mettle onscreen as well, as the stylish wife of a hedge-fund millionaire on Showtime's "Billions." The popular series will be returning for its third season Sunday.
"When I was 17 and feeling a bit lost, a friend of my mother's took me in and brought me to an introduction to some sort of life-coaching course," she recalls.
"I just went for the day, but there was something that was said in there that changed my point of view for the rest of my life. It was really simple ... your life is a clean canvas. You don't have to bring the past into it with you, and you can create your own ideals and own values and own morals, and you can paint your own painting," she says looking chic in a black jumpsuit dotted with blobs of fuchsia.
"I just hadn't thought of it that way. I went, 'Wow, I can do that. I can do whatever I want with my life, and I'm GOING to do whatever I want with my life.' There were a few things that were said that day. I said, 'From now on, I'm going to make my own decisions of what I want my life to look like.' That took years to figure out, but that was the first stepping stone."
The second stepping stone was modeling to pay for college where she was studying psychology. But she left after the first year. The "painting" she created for herself involved acting. Her mother, who was a dancer and model, understood. But her father was more circumspect. "First he was hesitant more out of the concern of � 'I just want you to be able to have a life and to be able to sustain that living, and acting is not known for that � unless you make it, it's a tough life.' I understand his reservation, but he never told me not to do it," she says, leaning forward in a blue paisley side chair.
Her parents had divorced when she was 6. Her dad moved back to Sweden and her mom stayed in Canada. That split profoundly affected her, she says. "That shatters a bit of your view. They were still heroes to me and still infallible and all that kind of stuff, but all of a sudden the family unit vision you have as a kid got shattered. And that was a big moment because there was a lot of things to work through and understand. That was a big change in my point of view of family."
Leaving Toronto, Akerman, 39, headed for L.A. where she spent two years without an acting nibble. Finally she was cast as the naive first-time actress in "The Comeback" with Lisa Kudrow. It was a role that paralleled her own life, marking her first professional role.
"I was doing music and was in a band, and I thought, 'What am I doing? I've totally fallen off my path. I'll give it ONE more shot.' And that's when I got 'The Comeback' because I was about to go back to Toronto and finish my studies."
Akerman married musician Roberto Zincone and had a son, Sebastian, now 5. He was 7 months old when she was cast in the sitcom "Trophy Wife." "Having a child changes everything in a really big way. It changed me in several ways _ for me it was the love and the joy and happiness you gain from this little person. If anything, they're a mirror and they reflect all the things � you see yourself in a completely different way, in a really vulnerable way. So it gave me the opportunity to check myself and go, 'All right, what are the things that I like about myself and don't like about myself? Because now I'm going to instill some of these things on this little child.' So for me, it became a very reflective stage of my life," she says, her blonde hair framed by the waning afternoon sun.
"You see the world again through a child's eyes and that is a beautiful thing. You start appreciating things again that you've lost touch with."
After six years of marriage she and her husband divorced. She's engaged to British actor Jack Donnelly ("Atlantis"), who has moved to the States. "He was planning to (move) anyway but I excelled that," she grins.
"We met because he was a friend of my sister's boyfriend and he kept coming out for pilot season for the past two years, just as an acquaintance. Then the last time he was out here, he stayed for a while, and we got to know each other a little better."
As of press time they hadn't set a date for the wedding. "We're working on that," she says.
FX REVEALS THE TRUTH BEHIND GETTY KIDNAPPING
Some of us may think we know the facts behind the kidnapping of billionaire John Paul Getty's grandson back in 1973. We'd be wrong. FX is setting the record straight with its opulent 10-part series, "Trust," premiering Sunday. The first three episodes are magnificently directed by Danny Boyle, and the series is produced by Simon Beaufoy and Christian Colson. The tale twists in ways we'd never expect. Beaufoy, who pored over sources, says a book by Charles Fox proved invaluable.
"He interviewed everybody in the family, including Little Paul Getty and Martine and Jutta, his girlfriend and her twin sister. And it became clear, reading in between the lines _ and we did a lot of research ourselves _ that he actually kidnapped himself. It was a hoax gone wrong. He owed money to some guys in Rome. Like all the Gettys, they were all multi-millionaires but couldn't pay for a drink because they had no cash. And he'd run up a debt, quite a large debt, and couldn't repay it. And the only thing he felt he could use was his name as a Getty," says Beaufoy.
"So he cooked up a kidnap plot, and when it went terribly wrong _ not a great move to cook up a kidnap plot with some of the most financially mean people in the world. So when it went wrong, he was sold on to the Mafia in southern Italy, a whole other, much more serious bunch of people. And he had some control, apparently, over his own self-kidnapping, to begin with. And then when he was sold on, he obviously had no control over events whatsoever."
ASTRONAUTS VIEW 'STRANGE ROCK'
National Geographic will unfold one of its best next Monday when it begins its 10-part series, "One Strange Rock," about the wonders of planet Earth and the experience of eight astronauts who've seen it from outer space. One of those is Chris Hadfield, the first Canadian to command the International Space Station and the first to be temporarily blinded while he was walking in space.
"There was contamination in my suit," he explains. "It got it in one eye, but without gravity, your tears don't drain out of your eye. So the tear got bigger and bigger until it was large enough to flood into my other eye and contaminated both my eyes. So during my first space walk, I was outside, blinded. But you can react a lot of different ways when that happens. If you think about it, every time you close your eyes, you're blinded.
"It's not like you die all of a sudden. And we train _ the eight of us train _ more than anybody ever knows, in preparation for things to go wrong. And it's really not so much what happens, but how is it that you have trained yourself in the past to be able to react to it? So even though I was struck blind, it's not something we hadn't considered. After a while, Mission Control said, 'Open up the valve in your spacesuit and let your oxygen hiss out to space, and maybe that will evaporate your tears faster.' So I was, like, 'OK. I'll do that.' ... But I was listening to my tiny little supply of oxygen hiss out and try and repressurize the entire universe.
"But eventually my eyes cleared. We closed it up, and let me get everything done. And if anything, it made the spacewalk more enjoyable because we had reached a challenge that I thought we'd never face, and we overcame it, and we got everything done."
BRANAGH CRIES 'FOWL' FOR DISNEY
Kenneth Branagh has a new gig for Disney: He's directing the fantasy "Artemus Fowl," which is based on the first book of the imaginative Eoin Colfer's series. Branagh has begun filming in England, but will haul the crew to Northern Ireland and to Ho Chi Minh City. The tale is about a boy who comes from a long line of criminal minds and finds himself in a battle with a hidden fairy kingdom which may be responsible for his father's disappearance.
Branagh, who of course began as an actor, says that directing is a whole different ballgame. "I suppose, on the satisfaction level, there is a profound level of satisfaction with directing on occasions that is different from acting, which by contrast, is much more purely and consistently enjoyable. I think it's quite hard to enjoy directing. You may be compelled to do it, and you may love doing it, but enjoying it is a strange paradox called 'impossibility' because there's too much to think about." Branagh has cast newcomer Ferdia Shaw in the title role and has coaxed Dame Judi Dench into playing the part of the leader of a branch of the fairy police force
