By NANCY MILLS
©2007 Associated Newspapers Ltd
Maggie Q found fame as a model before discovering that violence can pay. Spotted by the legendary Jackie Chan, she has gone on to appear in a string of action movies, along the way learning martial arts, sword-fighting and how to handle guns.
The Polo Lounge in the Beverly Hills Hotel is a bastion of old-style Hollywood glamour. Movie stars like Humphrey Bogart and Marlene Dietrich dined there regularly, and gossip columnists reported who was having a secret rendezvous with whom.
Today, it's full of elderly ladies in hats competing with tourists for tables. Not the place you'd expect a cool actress like Maggie Q to pick for coffee. But when Maggie breezes in, you can feel the air change.
For the past ten years, since she was spotted modelling in Hong Kong by the action-movie director and martial-arts star Jackie Chan, she has been on a mission to open Hollywood's eyes to the melting pot of American culture.
"I'm able to bridge the gap," says Maggie, born Maggie Quigley to a Polish-Irish American father and Vietnamese mother. "Because I have both an Asian understanding and a Western understanding, someone like me can prepare people for the fact that Asian-Americans are American."
Maggie, now 28, grew up in America's most ethnically mixed state, Hawaii, in the small town of Mililani, near Honolulu. Her father, who is ex-military, and her mother, an estate agent, still live there. 'Westerners are a minority in Hawaii,' she says.
"I grew up very Asian because of my mother, and because almost all my teachers were Japanese. (Hawaii is 58 per cent Asian.) Even though I had an American passport, I never felt I wanted to explore America."
So when she left school and it was time to strike out on her own as a model (the profession all her friends urged her to try), she looked to the East. "It felt natural to go to Asia," says Maggie, who also wanted to get away after breaking up with her first boyfriend.
"No one understood and no one approved. But I'm very strong-willed and I needed to do this on my own." It was difficult at the time, she admits, but later on she ended up feeling 'thank you so much for thinking I was an idiot: it made me want to get out there and prove you wrong'.
In Japan, where she headed first, and then in Taiwan, she discovered her mixed ethnicity wasn't Asian enough. But then someone suggested Hong Kong, where her distinctive look was an instant success. She quickly got modelling work and soon caught the eye of Jackie Chan.
"Jackie's people wanted me to do movies," Maggie explains, "but I didn't feel I was ready – I was afraid I'd screw up." But they kept asking her and, working with Chan, Maggie became a star, making films such as Naked Weapon and Dragon Squad, in action roles where she had to handle guns and throw punches (Chan's team trained her in martial arts).
She also had small roles in two of Chan's Hollywood films, Rush Hour 2 and Around the World in 80 Days. "The thing I love about Jackie is that he has worked very hard," Maggie says. "And that gives him a humility and graciousness that very few international stars have."
As her career in Asia flourished, her fans dubbed her Maggie Q because they couldn't pronounce Quigley. She appeared on hundreds of magazine covers, including Time's 2001 Eurasian issue, and she became the face of Shiseido cosmetics, a contract that ended recently. But gradually she began to believe her future lay back in America. Could she use her fame in Asia to conquer Hollywood?
Tom Cruise thought so when he cast her as the only woman on his team in Mission: Impossible III. And she turned heads as the villainous Mai Lihn in the fourth Die Hard movie, Die Hard 4.0. Yet today, no one in the Polo Lounge is paying any attention to this young beauty, who looks more like a college student than a serious adversary for Bruce Willis.
"If we were in Chinatown, people would know me," Maggie says, "but I don't want people to think of me for a role because of my ethnicity – and that takes a lot of work. It's hard enough for any ethnic-specific person in this business to get ahead – 95 per cent of scripts are for white girls, and although I'm mixed-race, they still see me as ethnic or 'exotic'." (She cringes as she says the word.)
"So, there's a fight that needs to happen – which is me going into meetings with directors, producers and casting agents and being myself and hoping they're enjoying me as a person and not thinking about my ethnicity. Changing people's minds is hard, but I have to show that someone like me needn't only play Asian. I hope I can star in a film in America without it being Memoirs of a Geisha."
Maybe her new film, Balls of Fury, co-starring Christopher Walken as a Chinese warlord, will help, by adding comedy to her repertoire.
She describes her character, also named Maggie, as "funny, because she's very mean. She has to train this white guy [Dan Fogler], a former professional ping-pong player, to be the best player in the world so that he can help the FBI with an investigation. She's got a hard exterior, but they end up falling for each other, and you see this nice, soft side to her – the person she actually is."
Next comes a thriller, The Tourist, with Ewan McGregor and Hugh Jackman, and after that, she returns to her first love, the action genre, in Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon, for which she had to learn sword-fighting in order to lead an army of 10,000 Chinese warriors.
Maggie is only 5ft 6in, but she comes across as formidable. "It's hard to be a girl in a guy movie," she says. "You have to be one of the guys – just go for it and don't be prissy about things. If you're willing to get down and dirty and don't worry about much, the guys have some respect for you. They come to work, do their job and go home. Both Tom Cruise and Bruce Willis are like that. They're no-nonsense, get-the-job-done actors."
And when they're relaxing? '"Tom is very outgoing," Maggie says. "He'll see you on set and give you the biggest hug. Bruce is more reserved. Both of them are very caring parents, but in a tough, no-nonsense way.
"One day, Tom and I were in the make-up trailer, together with his kids Bella and Connor, and Bella says to me, 'Hey, you're the girl in the Lamborghini [her Mission Impossible car]. Dad, I want that car.' And Tom said, 'Great. Work for it. Buy it yourself.' And Bruce will say, 'Don't give my daughters any special treatment.'"
In Los Angeles, where Maggie now spends most of her time, her social life is more likely to be cooking for friends and family than clubbing. "I'd rather have a small dinner party at my house than go out any day," she says. She learned to avoid the party circuit when she first started working in Hong Kong and now knows to avoid the paparazzi.
"Someone asked me, 'Is Los Angeles this big, scary place run by President Lindsay Lohan and Vice-President Paris Hilton?' I said, 'Absolutely not. Maybe one per cent of it is that way, but LA is what you make it.' I live in a very quiet house in the hills, away from everything. I have seven dogs, and I go hiking with them every morning. That's my life."
Maggie arrives for our interview in a skimpy sundress, without make-up, hair casually pulled back and her bare left arm revealing a tattoo in Chinese characters spelling the name of a friend who died in 2005. "This is the cheapest dress ever," she says. "I take fashion seriously only when I'm at a photo shoot. Usually it's whatever I'm comfortable with. That's all that matters."
On the subject of boyfriends, she says, "Love is very important, but it's in different forms everywhere." So is there someone? "I'm not available," she responds evasively. "But I'm never going to say I'm available, even when I am. In my ten years in the entertainment industry, I've had one relationship [in Hong Kong] that everyone knew about. People fell in love with us as a couple, and when we broke up I felt like I had to apologise to seven million people as well as getting through it myself. That was not fun."
Maggie's ideal man would need a sense of humour, because, she says, "laughter is a form of love. People take themselves so seriously." And he's unlikely to be an actor. "I shy away from guys in this business. Being with an actor takes its toll on a relationship. Imagine two narcissistic, self-absorbed people – it's not very conducive to being mutually supportive and loving, because you have to put so much time into yourself."
For unconditional love she turns to animals. "If I hadn't become an actress, I'd have been a vet. Animals always comforted me in a way that people never did. I will fight for their protection as long as I'm alive."
Maggie also feels passionate about Asia, which she says, "is where my heart is. I went to Vietnam when I was 13 and fell in love with my mother's side of my culture and everything it embodied. We're doing a family pilgrimage to Vietnam in October," she explains.
"My mother's family is from the north, and they fled to the south during the communist uprising. She has eight or nine brothers and sisters, and we're visiting them and doing a road trip from Saigon to the north."
She has much to discover, including the details of how her parents met during the Vietnam War, which they have never talked about.
"I want to interview my aunts and uncles and have them talk about how life was back then. My plan is to film a lot of the trip and make a small documentary for my family."
You can see that, if anyone is going to bridge the Asian-American gap in Hollywood, Maggie Q has the courage and the determination to do it.
