Kate Beckinsale: "In terms of my entire career I've done so many more small movies, so the thing about the larger movies is I guess they're more visible and they have a lot more of a budget to attract people to see that you've done them. But in terms of me myself, my experience is that I sort of stepped away from the independent movies and done a couple of big movies. But not necessarily how that's perceived by everybody else, which I do understand."
"There's different reasons that you do different jobs and certainly I felt when I first had my child and when she was growing up and I was a single mother - I wasn’t with her dad - I don’t think I personally could have felt good about having to dive as hard into a character as I had to on this movie. This was the first time I've actually not taken Lily to work with me every day, and it was inappropriate. We were in a functioning prison for quite a lot of it, and it was just not a place where you could really take a kid and hang out. And I wouldn't have been ready for that."
"And so some of my choices… You know, I know we always have to sit here and go, 'My god, I loved the script so much and the character is so fantastic,' but really there's a lot more prosaic reasons for why you do certain jobs than others and someone of them are that they shoot in town and I get to be with my kid because I’m the only parent that's here. You know what I mean? And that period of time started to change around the time I did Snow Angels, and I felt like my daughter was six or seven and at school and a little bit more solidified as a human being than she had been. I was married and had a very stable dad in the house and all that stuff. And I felt that I was able to be a little bit more selfish, in terms of the choices that I made."
"So it’s sort of the whole of your life, or the whole of my life, has been why I've made certain choices and I find myself completely baffled to go, ' Wow, sometimes the reasons that I've done a certain movie have been basically because I'm putting my child first.' And I’ve accidentally got this bombshell rap, you know, out of it. Which is kind of a weird schizophrenic feeling, but I think as long as you don’t just do that forever… People forgot that I ever did Shakespeare really fast. I think it’ll be harder to forget the rubber suit because somehow that kind of burned itself on peoples’ retinas."
On the Prospect of Doing Another Fantasy Film in the Future:
Kate Beckinsale: "I mean I can see that I might, yes. I could see if I found it really interesting. I've never played the same character twice until Underworld and most of the fun is to discover the character. I don’t know if I really want to do that a third time. You know, fortunately Michael [Sheen] was available so he kept it in the family. He did it instead."
On Underworld: Rise of the Lycans:
Kate Beckinsale: "I haven’t seen a cut of it. I have had, because Len [Wiseman's] producing it and Michael’s in it, I have had dailies and trailers playing almost nonstop in my house. I’m not probably going to be the very first one in the queue because I feel like I've seen it piecemeal over about nine months."
On How Underworld 3 Looks Minus Her Character:
Kate Beckinsale: "Fabulous without me! It looks fabulous without me. No, it looks great. It’s weird to see, you know, Michael suddenly growing fangs and I was like, 'Oh, I used to do that.' It’s funny. No, it looks really good. It looks great, but I haven't seen it all together. I've just seen bits."
On Still Not Having Learned to Drive:
Kate Beckinsale: "It is at pretty much the same point it was probably last time, which is nowhere. I'm looking forward to knowing how to drive because I do quite frequently get those anxiety dreams where I’m suddenly in control of a car on the freeway, and I’m assuming that those will go once I know how to drive because it won't be scary anymore. Yes, I haven’t got any further. I drove a golf cart on holiday and did quite admirably with that. That's a start."
"It’s now become, and it’s ridiculous because I do look out of the window and see actual children driving cars. 'Okay, there must be a possibility of me doing this.' I think initially it was practical reasons for so long. First of all, I was at Oxford so nobody really drives in Oxford. Enough of a problem to be riding a f--king bike, to be honest with you. Anyway, I mastered that and then in the holidays when everybody else was learning to drive I was off in Tuscany making a movie and all of that. So every summer I’d be away filming. And so that went on for a while and then just when I was starting to think, 'Okay, now I’m going to learn how to drive,' I suddenly found myself shockingly pregnant and thought, 'Sh-t!' you know? You know, I was really not expecting that one so I did a lot of research about cervixes and things to do. And then I had a baby and I thought, 'I can't possibly start driving with this baby in the car. I have to wait till…' And then I became quite old. I think you when you haven't done something like that and then you suddenly find yourself elderly and you think, 'Well, I can't go through this.' So I've got to figure it out because it’s turning into not a very attractive eccentricity. It was quite sort of, 'Ooh, isn’t she bohemian,' when I was 20, but now it’s just a little bit peculiar."
