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Over the past decade, British beauty Kate Beckinsale has had an American movie career that’s encompassed every genre from romance (Serendipity, The Aviator) to horror (Vacancy, the Underworld series). And while most of her films have been well received by audiences, she hasn’t yet found that singular project that could propel her into the upper realm of paychecks, or possibly thanking the Academy. Until now.

In her latest film, Nothing But the Truth, costarring Angela Bassett, Alan Alda, David Schwimmer, Matt Dillon, and Vera Farmiga, Beckinsale plays Rachel Armstrong, a Washington, DC-based reporter who reveals the identity of a CIA agent and then goes to jail for refusing to name her source. Written and directed by Rod Lurie, who has more than 13 years of experience as a journalist, the political thriller not only is poised to be a breakout role for Beckinsale, but is also better suited to the character of the actress, who’s as much a brainiac as she is a beauty.

“You start out as a 17-year-old academic who has decided to become an actress and you sort of go, ‘But why do I keep having to have a shower scene? Surely, all my education has not brought me to the point where I’m just standing in the shower,’” she jokes. “Lurie’s very attracted to writing extremely well-rounded parts for females. He’s fascinated with women in these extraordinary circumstances who display unusual fortitude and intelligence.”

Fortitude, intelligence, extraordinary—words that bring to mind the actress herself.

CAPITOL FILE: Tell us a little bit more about Nothing But the Truth.
KATE BECKINSALE: I keep having to tell people it isn’t a Judith Miller story, but I guess it’s loosely based on the idea.

CF: Did you do any research on Valerie Plame and Judith Miller for the role?
KB: Yes, absolutely, it was very current during shooting. I think that when you see the movie there are some significant differences, but obviously there are enough similarities that it was relevant to read [Plame’s] book. And I met with Judith Miller for a very quick lunch. She was quite gun-shy, I think, because she’s taken rather a bashing in the press. I was interested in the angle of what it was like to be someone who is academic and middle class, and is going to jail. It’s one thing talking to prisoners who actually, quite a few of them, expected that they would end up in jail at some point. It’s a very different take on somebody who is in Judith’s position, who finds herself in jail and never expected that she would ever end up there.

CF: What was it like to film in a prison?
KB: If I hadn’t decided against a life of crime before, I definitely have now. They were quite frightening about “Don’t touch anything and always wash your hands.” The level of general filth, I didn’t really think hard about it, but the prison warden was really worried about us touching things and getting hepatitis or something. But it was quite interesting because the weird celebrity culture that we’re in, it doesn’t matter whether people are incredibly oppressed in prison, they still want me to autograph their Bible. You feel ridiculous dressed up in a very similar prison costume, and you know they’re all looking at you thinking, “She’s going home to her hotel, and we’re staying here.”

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CF: A large part of the film’s plot centers on a very daunting ethical question. Did you find yourself wondering, What would I do in that situation?
KB: I think that if you’re not the person involved, then it’s much easier to come at it from a hypothetical, intellectual place. I didn’t find anything particularly interesting in playing someone who is heroically standing up for a principle. As an actor, [you try to] find the personal, the emotional reasons. It’s almost as if you’re trying to play someone who’s saintly. There’s nothing more boring to watch than somebody going around making the right decisions all the time. As a woman and a mother, I had a very hard time with how long my character is in jail without seeing her son. I know that in terms of heroics, I probably would be less capable because I would be thinking of the effect on my child and I’d probably have to come home.

CF: What most attracted you to the script of Nothing But the Truth?
KB: It’s a really well-written, intelligent movie that’s about something. My character starts out in very normal circumstances. She’s an ordinary person who’s trying to catch her break as a journalist, raise her young son, and keep her marriage afloat—all those things everybody’s doing. And then she finds herself in a very extraordinary position of having to be heroic, which I think is interesting because I don’t think anybody sets out to be heroic. There’s a lot that you sacrifice, and it’s very interesting to see this woman have to keep going through experience after experience that’s changing who she is, what she stands up for, and how she manages to keep hold of that all the way through.

CF: The director, Rod Lurie, has both a political and a journalistic background. What did that add to the film?
KB: He really knew that world very well, which was great—all of our meetings felt very authentic. In fact, he’s actually in the film; he plays a journalist, he was so convinced of his authority. Also, he has a great history of writing extremely wellrounded parts for females. He wrote the part for Joan Allen in The Contender; Commander in Chief was also his.

I’ve had great luck working with writer/directors. I find that they’re so confident in their material that they’re able to hand it over to you and let you put your own stamp on it. And [Lurie] did that with everybody. We were all very much allowed to make the characters our own, whether it was collaborating on rewriting or coming up with other ideas—he was really open and really into all that.

CF: As you were promoting this political film, America was going through quite an interesting election. Did you follow it at all?
KB: I followed it in a very strange position of not being able to do anything about it whatsoever because I’m not an American citizen and couldn’t vote. It was impossible to not be caught up in it—it’s such an extraordinary period of time. And we don’t have debates in England, so that whole thing was very fascinating to me. But I was constantly trying to sit on people and get them to vote for Obama for me.

CF: You do spend quite a lot of your time here in America. Have you ever thought about becoming an American citizen?
KB: I haven’t yet; I may at some point. A British friend of mine—a much older man who’s about the most British person I’ve ever met and has been here God knows how long—has just become an American citizen. He may not be American, but his children live here and he wanted to be part of voting on who’s going to be in power for them, which makes sense to me. I have to say I’ve never planned on living in America. I seem to have got myself here, to my amazement, married to an American—none of these things was I remotely anticipating. Maybe if I find myself still here in 10 or 15 years it would probably be silly not to be able to vote.

CF: You’ve got several other movies coming up, including Everybody’s Fine with Robert De Niro.
KB: Everybody’s Fine is a remake of an Italian movie about a man who’s older and has grown children. His wife dies and he realizes that he hasn’t really been present in his relationships with his children, so he gets on a train and decides to go around the country visiting. Of course there’re all these family secrets that become exposed. I play his daughter, Drew Barrymore plays his other daughter, and Sam Rockwell—who is one of my favorite people ever—plays his son.

CF: What was it like working with De Niro?
KB: When I was at Oxford, I had a photograph of him on my fridge because I was such a big fan, so it was quite weird suddenly playing his daughter. Then they needed flashbacks of all of us being children and they asked me if [my daughter] Lily would audition. I said no because I thought she’d be on the set, and if she didn’t get it, it would be such a disaster. But she insisted on auditioning, and got it, and had her three scenes with Robert De Niro, which I thought was absolutely wild at the age of eight.

CF: That’s quite a start to Lily’s acting career. Did you or Lily find De Niro intimidating?
KB: I had run into him about nine years before and found him extremely intimidating then, but he couldn’t have been nicer. I think it was a very personal, emotional project for him and he really wanted us all to feel fatherly-daughterly with him. He was absolutely lovely and kept feeding everybody cannolis. Lily was a total fan for life once he introduced her to cannolis; the allegiance was set.

CF: You also have Whiteout being released in fall of ’09.
KB: And I also did a movie called Winged Creatures with Forest Whitaker, Dakota Fanning, and Guy Pearce. I started Whiteout and then they stopped for a few weeks so I could do Winged Creatures, and then started Whiteout again. It was very schizophrenic because in Winged Creatures I had to gain 20 to 25 pounds, have my hair completely bleached horribly blonde, and play a trashy single mother suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder— then go straight back to playing a federal marshall in Antarctica. It was quite a strange few months.

CF: So as soon as you wrapped Winged Creatures it was like, how fast can you lose 20 pounds?
KB: That was the real advantage of Whiteout being set in Antarctica. [We filmed] in Manitoba, which was minus 57 degrees, so I think I was wearing at least six pairs of pants at any given moment. I didn’t really know what was going on with my actual behind.

Additional reporting by April Walloga.