Jaime King ('My Bloody Valentine')

Jaime King is a gorgeous blond with a great personality. Who knew these things were ever paired in nature? She's been in the horror film The Tripper, the comic adaptation The Spirit and now she stars in the My Bloody Valentine remake - and she rocks in it. She's writing a fantasy screenplay that Frank Miller is producing, a sci-fi comic book series, and is about to direct her first short film for Comedy Central. Read this exclusive interview with Jaime as she dishes the dirt on being a former model and how kick-ass her new movie is. And it really is;

“I play Sarah Palmer. She’s an awesome woman,” says Jaime of her character in the My Bloody Valentine remake, which is in 3-D and is so much fun!

“The reviews have been so awesome!” says Jaime excitedly. “The responses have been so much more amazing than I could have ever thought.”

“She saw a bunch of murders happen when she was a teenager,” continues Jaime about Sarah Palmer, “the love of her life disappeared for a decade afterwards. She ends up getting married to the sheriff of the town who is the kind of enemy of her first love. And she married him because he was really there for her, and I think she felt like he was a good man. But ultimately, I think she never felt the way she did with her first love. So he shows up after a decade, and she has a beautiful little kid also, and all these emotions start getting kicked up, and at the same time this happens all the murders start happening again,” she blurts. “So,” she says decidedly with a smile, “she’s basically screwed.”

My Bloody Valentine takes place in a small town that is being plagued by a mysterious killer in a minor’s uniform, complete with deadly pickaxe. Jaime King’s Sarah Palmer finds herself caught up right in the middle of everything.

“What I love about my character is that she’s the kind of woman who fights,” says Jaime King. “ Like, she’ll go back for her friends - she’s the one who will kick ass if she needs to. And I also love that she’s kind of like a tragic character, she’s not your typical horror movie leading lady.”

Sarah Palmer is a very fleshed-out character and definitely not a cliché of any kind. I think that’s part of what makes My Bloody Valentine so easy to watch despite the classic horror moments and standard gore and nudity clichés (that turn out really well).

Jaime worked really hard on making Sarah Palmer a ‘real’ person. “We added so much- we worked really hard on the script to add multitudes of layers to it, because I couldn’t, it would be really hard for me to play something that was really thankless and where I couldn’t do anything with the acting. We made her very layered and I love that it turned out that way.”

Of all the amazing and gory scenes in the movie, shown in brilliant 3-D, Jaime has two favorites. First is the extended nudity scene (you’ll understand when you see it) in which actress Betsy Rue runs naked through a motel parking lot. Jaime appreciated Betsy’s courage (as I think most of us do) to perform such a scene.

“I’d be like, ‘you can’t shoot me from that angle cause that’s where my cellulite is’. Or, ‘You can’t see my ass in the full light. Maybe you could shoot me with a candle.” I don’t have the balls for that. I don’t have the confidence.”

Her second favorite scene is the one in which Sarah Palmer and the younger Megan (played by Megan Boone) are stalked in a grocery store after closing.

Of course, horror actor extraordinaire Tom Atkins (Creepshow, The Fog, and Halloween III) is in the film as the retired sheriff!

“I’m always honored when I can work with such an icon in any genre,” says Jaime, who is a huge horror and genre movie fan. “To me, it’s just such a huge blessing. And so cool that he did this movie! And it adds so much more for horror fans to see him.”

Jensen Ackles and Kerr Smith are both terribly attractive men and lucky Jaime gets to costar with both of them. How does she deal with being so close to two such sexy men?

“I’m married, I am so head over heels with my husband, and now I’m like really good friends with Kerr, and I was hanging out with his wife her in-between scenes...” she says, “But they’re really hot,” she admits. “They’re fun to look at.”

According to Jaime, women should see My Bloody Valentine because “you get to see a strong leading woman, you get to see a woman who is totally uninhibited with her body, you get to see some really fun gore, but then you also have relationships and a love triangle. There are so many different things for so many different sides of what women love. And Hot men.”

Jaime started off her acting career as a model when she was just a teenager. There are so many strange things about weight and age projected by the modeling world and it has a weird effect on regular women.

“It has a huge affect on me!” says Jaime. “When I started modeling I did it because I loved photography and I loved fashion, but I was 14 years old! I was a kid, I hadn’t gone through puberty. And all of a sudden, I turned 18 and I couldn’t eat freaking Burger King anymore. All of a sudden, I was like, ‘Oh my god, my hips, my thighs, everything has changed!’ And then I had to work my ass off to stay thin. I had to work out an hour to two hours every day, and we’re voluptuous women in our family!

Finally, I am at a point where I am happy with the way I look. I am never gonna be a size zero, I am never gonna look the way I did when I was 15 and in my modeling photos, but you know what? I look like a woman. And I appreciate that. So what I would like women to know when they look at these magazines is that they can’t expect themselves to look like that because these women are prepubescent, basically.”

I’ve never been able to come up with a good reason why the modeling industry prefers to use such painfully thin and young women over regular adults, since women are the ones that buy the clothes they’re selling, but Jaime has an interesting thought:
“I think the modeling industry likes to use, and I know this is going to sound weird, but, a clothes hanger. Their whole purpose is to sell clothes. So they want something that basically has no figure so the clothes become the main attraction, not the person.”

Jaime’s major acting roles have been in genre films not just because she got lucky, but because she loves genre movies!

“I am a genre nerd-fan.” Admits Jaime with no shame. “I go to Comic-Con [in San Diego, California] just to hang out... I am a huge fan of Star Wars, Harry Potter Lord of the Rings, Sci-Fi Movies, that’s what I generally am attracted to. I love movies that attract a good fan base because I am a fan. These movies provide fewer limitations; they let you create worlds and universes and let you speak any kind of language and you can do any kind of thing you want. Everybody wants to be a hero, or have a hero inside them.”

She’s super excited because “I play a bad-ass character on the animated series The Clone Wars,” but she can’t talk about what character yet.

She’s also not just an actress – she has a budding directing and screenwriting career. “I’m writing a sci-fi comic book series, and I am writing a screenplay, and I am directing my first short for Comedy Central.”

Her script, which Frank Miller is producing, has “all strong female characters and involves a world called EverWonderLand, where all characters from all myths and legends live.”