Whether she's an ambitious reporter on the WB series Pepper Dennis or performing acrobatics as X-Men: The Last Stand's shape-shifting mutant, Mystique, Rebecca Romijn has been everywhere lately, and CineVegas is no exception. The statuesque beauty has two films at the festival: Lies and Alibis, a thriller about commercialized adultery and murder that's playing June 17 at 7 p.m.; and Wet Dreams, a documentary about her personal quest to design a fountain show at Bellagio, which is showing June 12 at 8:30 p.m. and June 13 at 3 p.m.
You have two films showing at CineVegas this month, you're in the No. 1 movie in the world right now, you've been doing a TV series and on top of all that, you somehow found time to design a fountain show at Bellagio. So what's life like without sleep?
Exhausting! No, these things were spread out over the last year and a half of my life, so it's not like I was doing them all at the same time. Thankfully, or I'd be dead. But I love the way you make it sound like so much. It's been exciting.
So tell me a little bit about Lies and Alibis. What attracted you to the project?
It was just a really fun caper movie. It's a great ride and a fantastic group of people, between Steve Coogan, Sam Elliot, Selma Blair, Henry Rollins and James Marsden—who's an old friend of mine from the X-Men movies. Even Jerry [O'Connell], my fiancé, is in it, which was just a total coincidence. So it was just a really fun thing to work on.
And the documentary Wet Dreams seems to be quite the passion project for you.
That is a labor of love in the purest form of the word.
Where did your fascination with fountains come from?
Well, like many people who come to Vegas, my friend Steve Willis, who's a filmmaker, and I have spent hours sitting in front of fountains being completely mesmerized by them. And it started off as one of those cockamamie ideas that you have with your friends sometimes, where you go, "Wouldn't it be cool if blah-ba-dee, blah-ba-dee, blah-ba-dee, blah." But most people just fade out and let it go. We kept talking about it. We thought how cool would it be to choreograph one of these—to pick our own music and actually choreograph one of these fountain shows? ... It was something we felt so passionate about, we just had to see how far we could take it. It ended up being the most satisfying, fulfilling thing we'd ever been a part of.
It sounds like you had a lot of fun. You even got to take a dip in the fountain.
Yeah, it's in the documentary. They let us swim in the center ring in the fountain during one of the shows.
Was that for inspiration or just to escape the Las Vegas heat?
It was hot that day! It was just such a cool thing to do. I can't even imagine. I couldn't believe that they were letting us do it, actually.
And lastly, they're billing X-Men 3 as the final installment in the franchise. But if they did choose to do another, would you be interested in reprising your role as Mystique? Or have you had your fill of blue latex and body paint?
I don't know. We'll see. After the success of the third one, I'm sure they've got a fourth one up their sleeve.