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"Go to Chinatown and pick someone out of a noodle store after our conversation," instructs Maggie Q from the windy balcony of her sister's house in Pasadena. "Ask them to say 'Quigley.' There's no way in hell they'll be able to do it." The Hawaiian-born actress is explaining why her Irish surname (she is also part Vietnamese and Polish) was shortened by the media in China, where she's a huge action-movie star and people need to be able to say her name easily, and often.
Stateside, the 28-year-old is best known as the agent in Mission: Impossible III who invents the eighth deadly sin: blowing up a Lamborghini outside the Vatican while wearing an incendiary red dress that seems to have been painted on by someone who missed a few spots. Q is usually the hero, but this summer she's swapping sides to play an American terrorist in the latest installment of that other huge action franchise, Die Hard. "I really liked playing a bad guy," says Q of her character, Mai Lihn, whom John McClane (Bruce Willis) must defeat so he can save the world (and, for some reason, the life of that guy from the Mac commercials). Working with Willis was, Q says diplomatically, "interesting." She won't elaborate, but it couldn't have been as difficult as what came next: six weeks in the Gobi desert playing a Han Dynasty general in Three Kingdoms: Resurrection of the Dragon, one of the biggest Chinese films ever made. "I'm bloody surprised I'm alive," she says, her speech peppered with British slang from her nine years in Hong Kong. "I only had five days to learn my fights, and we had battle scenes with 100,000 soldiers and 10,000 horses." Luckily, Q is used to being around animals: She lives with seven dogs she rescued from animal shelters.
With appearances later this year alongside Hugh Jackman in the psychological thriller The Tourist and Christopher Walken in the ping-pong comedy Balls of Fury, Q may finally be able to drop the Big in Asia sobriquet. But even so, she's still contending with the limited roles available for an Asian actress in Hollywood. "Some people are used to certain things," she says of the stereotypes she has to overcome. "But we're living and working in a world market now, and it's not all about what people in the Midwest think anymore, or what they want to identify with." She pauses, perhaps considering her own global commodity. "It's about what the world wants to identify with."
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