A quick word with Radha Mitchell

Australian actress Radha Mitchell can be seen currently on screen in sci-fi horror Pitch Black and hanging out in Foxton as the star of Shearer's Breakfast (the third feature by Kiwi director Scott Reynolds). The Melbourne-bred, Los Angeles-based Mitchell has worked here before, opposite Cliff Curtis in mini-series The Chosen, while her more recent credits include American indie hit High Art.

Hear you're working nights and sleeping days at the moment?

Yeah, a vampire schedule.

What's the Shearer's Breakfast role involve?

I'm a girl who manages a diner and gets interrupted one evening by this stranger who strangely starts to tell a strange story about how there are some people after him. The whole story is about her finding out the truth or the non-truth in this story and gradually getting involved in this pretty scary scenario and in the end everything blows up and everybody dies. But it's a quirky, very interesting sort of script.

Sounds almost like the ending of Pitch Black, which is your first big Hollywood flick, albeit one which was made in Australia ...

Yeah. Pitch Black happened just when I was planning to move to America and I'd just packed my suitcases and then the first job I got was in Australia. It was kind of ironic.

And it was shot in Coober Pedy - can't get much more Australian than that.

Yeah never been there before. It's an interesting place. Everyone lives underground over there and they all look for opals and people kind of get stuck out there and end up opening takeaway joints.

From the daylight bits of the film, it looks like a lot of suntan lotion was required ...

No, not at all - it was freezing cold. We were pretending it was hot - a lot of acting required, and it was bit of a nightmare. In fact, Shearer's Breakfast is gruelling as well. We've been shooting at night and we've had one whole week where we were soaking wet because there's a scene where everyone gets doused in petrol.

Sounds very Titanic Yes, very soggy.

Are you much of a sci-fi fan?

Um, I wasn't but I am now and I think especially right now with the turn of the millennium everyone is kind of preoccupied with what will happen, in a way that they probably haven't been since the 50s.

Sci-fi's a Boys' Own genre, whereas previously you've mainly done girls' films ...

Definitely. It was a very boys' movie. Very testosterone-driven, with lots of testosterone dialogue. Lots of push-ups and running around screaming - definitely a boys' movie, but I think it will attract women to it as well because it does have interesting female characters and, of course, there's Vin Diesel's muscles.

The easy comparison for your character in Pitch Black would be Ripley in Alien ...

That's the easy one only because there's not really many you can compare it to, I guess. There're just not that many roles for women in sci-fi films unless they are the damsel in distress. I watched the first Alien in particular because after that she turned into a superhero. I would have loved to have been a superhero but I wasn't allowed to be.

Between Pitch Black and Shearer's Breakfast it sounds like you've been doing a fair number of night-shifts recently. So are you afraid of the dark?

Yes, but the whole world is afraid of the dark. No one can deal with just blackness. You notice that where I am staying now. I had been staying in Palmerston North and I've just moved out to Foxton - I love Foxton. Palmy stinks. The thing about Foxton is when night descends you really feel it because the streets are black and I don't think people are used to that any more.