The Next Big Thing: Yvonne Strahovski - Inscris-toi gratuitement et surfe sans pub !
The Next Big Thing: Yvonne Strahovski
| Yvonne Strahovski’s life has been a bit of a whirlwind over the past year. In that time, the Australian, blonde-haired beauty sent in an Internet audition for the show Chuck, landed the part of top CIA agent Sarah Walker and moved her life to L.A., entering the Hollywood scene as a capable newbie after acting in Sydney for a few years. (If this says anything about her talent, she had a meeting with the network after walking off the 15-hour flight, jetlagged from the trip—and still got the role.) These days, her average day consists of being on the set for about 15 hours, an hour and a half of which is spent in the makeup chair. And, to prepare for her fight scenes in Chuck, she has been training in kung fu. She’s come a long way from Sydney. “It’s only been in the past three months that I’ve really started to feel settled in here,” Strahovski says. “I have my own furniture now; for a long time I just had a mattress.” The only daughter of Polish parents, Strahovski is no stranger to being away from home. “As I was growing up, we traveled a lot. Every weekend we were at a beach or exploring the East Coast of Australia, some road trip or some camping trip. And certainly thanks to my parents, I’ve seen a lot of the world as well.” And though being away from her parents has been difficult, they remain the most supportive people in Strahovski’s life, despite the distance—although that wasn’t always the case. “When it finally came down to finishing high school and I said I wanted to go to drama school, they were quite adamant that I should go and become a doctor or a lawyer or something that had a guaranteed income, because actors are known to be unemployed most of the time,” she says. “And I just persisted and I got into drama school straight away and I think throughout those three years they grew to realize that I wasn’t going to budge from my decision, and now they are 110 percent supportive.” Strahovski misses her family and friends and the adventures Australia offered, but says, “to be honest I don’t have a lot of time to get homesick because I’m so busy.” Back in Sydney, the 25-year-old would often take off with friends to go caving, camping or rock climbing. “I’ve always been a very outdoors sort of girl,” she says. “I’m more a tomboy than a girly girl.” These days she’s traded in some of those activities for martial arts training, which is a challenge she is thrilled to have taken on. “One of my favorite parts about the job is doing all the fight scenes and learning all the choreography for it,” she says. But the girl’s got brains, too. In honor of the fact that Chuck centers around a computer geek, Strahovski reveals her nerdy side: “I loved school, I loved putting on my uniform and doing homework every day,” she says. “I was one of those good students that the teachers liked. I guess that’s got to be a pretty nerdy, geeky part of me.” Although she doesn’t exactly come off like a certified dork, Strahovski does seem to have a refined sense about her, a wiser-than-her-years type of quality. Perhaps it’s a result of her training as an actress, which she says has helped her understand people. “[It’s given me] a heightened sense of how someone is feeling, whether or not they’re talking about it. I think actors are sort of trained to do that in their everyday job and I think that’s kind of one of the best parts about it,” she explains. Certainly that aptitude helped her lend a richness to her role in the soon-to-be-released film The Canyon, in which she plays half of a young newlywed couple who decides to spend their honeymoon in the Grand Canyon. “The guide takes them to all sorts of remote places that the tourists don’t really go to in the canyon, and something happens that kind of makes the trip go horribly wrong,” she says. “And it’s a survival story for the couple. I guess you could call it kind of a thriller/drama.” She also happens to be a scary movie buff herself. “I love watching a good, freaky horror movie,” she confesses. “I love it. It’s one of my favorite things to do, to go and see at the cinema. Just to tune out and be freaked out.” So, would she trade in her hectic new schedule to go back to doing some of the other things she loves? “This is what I’m here for and I’m so happy,” she says. “I feel very blessed to be where I’m at at the moment with the show and I wouldn’t have it any other way.” Neither would we. • |
