Carrie-Anne Moss says the world may be a computer-generated fake

By ANDREW GUMBEL

Carrie-Anne Moss hasn't taken too well to being propelled into the maelstrom of popular culture. In fact she doesn't really believe it has happened.

Okay, she played Trinity, the latex-clad warrior princess in the runaway cult hit The Matrix. That much she is sure of.

But the attendant fuss? The magazine pictures and interviews? The websites idolising her ice-cool fembot chic? The media salivating over the forthcoming shoots for Matrix II and Matrix III?

She's not certain that all this exists, much less that it has anything to do with her.

It's not that fame is an embarrassment or a burden, requiring a healthy dose of denial to become bearable.

Her concern is altogether more metaphysical, something to do with the weirdness of being recognised by strangers when she has a certain difficulty recognising herself.

To illustrate her point, she tells a story. A little while ago she ran into a 10-year-old with her father on the street. The father immediately pointed in her direction and said, "Hey, that's the actress who played Trinity!"

But the 10-year-old gave her a long, hard look and begged to differ. "Her?" she said dismissively. "No way!"

Curiously, Moss was inclined to agree with the kid. Call it her Matrix complex, her apparent belief in the premise underlying the sci-fi fantasy that brought her to prominence.

She really wonders sometimes if what we take to be sensory perception of the "real" world isn't just a computer-generated artifice intended to lull us into a falsely comforting sense of ourselves.

"Look at anything on television," she says, growing animated over coffee in a West Hollywood bar. "Look at politics. I mean, we saw images of Bill Clinton being the President. We were told he was the President. But did anyone actually see him, the flesh and blood person? Did you ever see him? Maybe he was just a computer construct. Okay, I admit, the chances are he wasn't, but does that make a difference? He might as well have been a computer image as far as our perception of him goes."

From the mouth of another actress, this line of thinking might come across as incurably trite, a cunning but hollow piece of scripting from the very publicity machine Moss professes not to believe in.

What better tag, after all, could the producers of The Matrix and its sequels dream up than an actress who actually believes in the storyline of a corrupt world replaced by intentionally deceptive computer imagery?

But it sounds somehow refreshing from Moss, who comes across several degrees warmer than her screen persona, her pale olive skin, dark hair and striking green eyes giving her a Mediterranean air.

She talks enthusiastically about her animals (10 of them at the last count, including five new puppies), her husband (fellow Canadian Steven Roy) and expresses almost girlish excitement at meeting personal idols like Juliette Binoche, her co-star in Chocolat.

When it comes to acting and the star-making machinery of Hollywood, however, she is nonchalant almost to the point of indifference.

"I'm so damn lucky to make a living acting", she acknowledges, "but it's not that I love it, not all the time. If I couldn't act I wouldn't die. I'm much more interested in the human aspect of life than the pretend."

Her strongest memories of shooting Chocolat in rural France were her conversations with Judi Dench, who plays her mother - "just talking about life with someone who is amazing"- and an unlikely friendship she struck up with a cow.

Moss has a flurry of films coming out in the next few months, but there will then be a hiatus until Matrix II begins shooting. She will concentrate on getting her body in shape for the ordeals of wire work and spinning cartwheels off walls.

Pauses between jobs don't bother her. In fact she just took four months off to escape the film world madness to "be in my life."

Aside from watching her diet and pushing weights, she doesn't have a care in the world.

She may not believe it is happening to her, but it's nice work, and she's got it.

* Chocolat opens Thursday, January 31.

- HERALD CORRESPONDENT