Secrets of X-Womanhood disclosed

CANNES, France - The women of "X-Men: The Last Stand" can kick your butt. The Associated Press sat down with Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, Rebecca Romijn and Anna Paquin at the Cannes Film Festival, where the movie premiered.

The third film based on the Marvel comics about superpowered mutants, "Last Stand" features Berry as weather-controlling Storm, Paquin as lifeforce-draining Rogue, Romijn as evil shapeshifter Mystique and Janssen as Jean Grey, a mega-telepath with a nasty alter ego called Dark Phoenix.

AP: Did you ever envy one another's superpowers?

Berry: I envied that I never really got to do my powers until the third movie. Fly and do electricity and spin and make a tornado like I got to do now. I envied that I never got to do what I do.

Paquin: I still never get to do anything. Three movies, absolutely no action. It's kind of amazing.

Romijn: Somebody's always got it worse than you.

Paquin: I managed to survive three action comic-book movies and pretty much almost not to see one single bit of real violence or, you know, action sequences.

Berry: You'll have to do a Rogue spinoff, just so you can do something.

Paquin: Dude, I don't know if anybody wants to see that, actually.

Berry: Well, you got a great love story. I didn't have that. I got no action and no story. I had nothing.

Paquin: I had some gloves.

AP: Who would win in a smackdown among Storm, Mystique, Rogue and Jean?

Janssen: Jean or Phoenix? If it's Phoenix, I say Phoenix wins.

Romijn: I would say Phoenix wins, too. I think we establish in `X-Men 3' that Phoenix is ultimately the most powerful.

Janssen: If you put Jean into the mix, I'm not sure how well she's going to fare.

Romijn: We've established that Jean hasn't been used to her full potential, so when she becomes Phoenix, it's a whole new thing. She's repressed.

Janssen: Yeah, Jean's got some issues. She's in therapy, if that makes you feel any better.

Paquin: Who would win depends if I'm going to be close enough to touch them. That's kind of a trump card, isn't it?

AP: So if Rogue sneaks up on Jean from behind ...

Paquin: Yeah, if she doesn't see it coming ...

Janssen: The thing is, of course, she can see it coming, because she reads minds.

Romijn: But Mystique could turn into any of them and just confuse everyone.

Janssen: And Storm can just make it misty and foggy.

Romijn: She would lose.

Janssen: She would lose because I can just see right through that fog.

AP: So what's up with the hair? Storm's got a powder-puff thing going this time and Jean's has turned fiery red.

Janssen: It was really a hair commercial, if you think about it. We all said, if you want to get a great hair commercial out of this movie, let's just make sure that the hair changes and upstages everything.

Romijn: They tried to give Mystique a bob. It was awful. Like a weird Mom bob. We went back to the old hair.

Berry: It's a woman's right to change her hair, and I think it's not by mistake that all the women have different hair, like, every time.

Paquin: I don't.

Berry: That's what women do. We change our hair.

Paquin: I don't.

AP: You don't what?

Paquin: I don't have different hair. I'm never different.

AP: With women so prevalent, are the "X-Men" movies female-empowerment films?

Romijn: What I like most about these movies is they're not gender-specific at all. Yeah, of course, the women kick butt, and so do the guys. It's a non-issue.

Paquin: It's never even addressed. When they're going into battle, it's more whose power is most useful.

Janssen: I find it's rare to see in a Hollywood movie, period, that many female characters. That many strong female characters. But specifically in the genre of comic-book adaptations, it just does not happen, because you have "Superman," you have "Batman," you have all these characters, and then you have the love interest. The fact that we have that many female characters in a movie of any size in Hollywood, it's great.

AP: Famke, was it more fun playing Jean as good or evil?

Janssen: The combination of the two. That's how I view people. It's how I view life. You can't stereotype people, you can't put them into boxes. Everybody is a complex individual who has both good and evil, sad and happy. You name it.

AP: Anna, why does Rogue find her ability to steal others' power a curse?

Paquin: She's completely isolated. She doesn't have the option of conducting a normal life or having normal relations with people. It's also a lot more recent. She's a lot younger, so it's been less time to get used to it. I feel like maybe if she had a little more time, she might have come to sort of accept that.

AP: Halle, how is it that Storm comes to really assert herself this time?

Berry: Storm finally steps up and takes a stand and asserts herself and has a voice. She becomes truly what she was in the comic book. She has to use all her powers finally for the good of all her team and for the good of what she believes in. For me as an actor, each time you want to feel like your character evolves and grows, and this time I feel like she did in spades. I enjoyed her so much more this time.

AP: Rebecca, why's Mystique the bad egg? Was she just a mutant from the wrong side of the tracks?

Romijn: I think she was probably so ostracized by the way she looked from a really young age. She was probably treated really bad because of it. I can understand why she was so angry. In the second movie, Nightcrawler asks her if she can look like everybody else, why don't you look like everyone? She says because you shouldn't have to. She has a really strong sense of identity. She really knows who she is.

AP: What kind of superhero would your moms have been happy to have you bring home as boyfriends?

Janssen: Oh, my God. Ask my mom, she's here.

Berry: I don't know. I'd just like one to tell the truth. I'd be happy with an honest one.

Romijn: Honesty Man!

Berry: Could you at least not lie? Tell the truth all the time?

Romijn: Love Man! I just want my daughter to be loved.

Janssen: Yeah, and be happy.

Romijn: Love Man, Honesty Man, Happy Man!

Janssen: No, not Happy Man. Me to be happy. Not a happy man. God, no.

Paquin: All of the above, how about that?