ON MOVIES
Can’t Superman just fly her there?

BREAK FROM SMALLVILLE: Kreuk will soon jet to India to finish role as Muslim refugee
Glen Schaefer

Kristin Kreuk hit the ground running after a three-week European spring vacation. The Vancouver actor is juggling work on the fifth season of TV’s Smallville, where she plays iconic Middle-American girl Lana Lang, with her role in the ambitious independent film Partition, an epic period romance that has her playing a Muslim refugee in strife-torn 1940s India and Pakistan.
The two roles couldn’t be farther apart. Work on Partition includes two weeks of filming in India, although Vancouver director Vic Sarin managed to shoot most of the movie in B.C. this summer. The B.C.-filmed Smallville, which started filming this month, is giving Kreuk two weeks off in September to finish Partition in India.

“I have a feeling I’ll be a little bit tired, but I’m hoping the adrenaline will keep me going,” says the 22-year-old Kreuk, who first read Sarin’s Partition script two years ago and hoped the makers would be able to see her as the film’s Muslim refugee.
“Doing Smallville sometimes I thought that I’d never get the opportunity to do anything that I was really excited about, because people don’t think of me for those roles,” she says. “I think Canadian projects are more likely to open their minds about who they hire, which is really lucky for me, because this is the first script I read that I was really, truly excited about.”

Partition is set amid the violence and upheavals during the years that followed the division of India and Pakistan after British colonial authorities left in the 1940s. Kreuk plays Naseem, a Muslim teen separated from her family on the wrong side of the India-Pakistan border. She gets shelter from Gian, a Sikh soldier-turned-farmer played by Britain’s Jimi Mistry, and the two fall in love.

“It has my voice in it,” Kreuk says. “I just really want to be able to say the things that we’re saying in the film. As much as I love Smallville, I don’t always believe the things that we’re trying to portray.”

Sarin, the movie’s Indian-born, Vancouverbased co-writer and director, says he chose Kreuk for the role to give the epic romance a universal aspect.

“I wanted actors who didn’t have Bollywood acting sensibilities,” Sarin says. “Kristin is a very instinctive actress, which I enjoy very much. She’s very brave to take this role — different culture, different mannerisms, everything.”

Alongside Kreuk and Mistry, Neve Campbell plays an Indian-British woman who helps the young woman reunite with her family.
Because she isn’t Indian herself, Kreuk spent weeks meeting with Pakistani women to get cultural details right.

“I didn’t believe that I would be offered this role because of the fact that I’m not Indian,” say Kreuk, who is of mixed Dutch-Chinese heritage. “I put a lot of work into it to make sure that I was representing the culture with intelligence and respect.”

A research assistant of Pakistani background on the film took Kreuk to a local mosque, and Kreuk talked with women “about their ideas of love and duty and honour and all of those things. They’re very excited that somebody, this film, is going to give a little bit of insight into what Islam is, and how it’s not necessarily the extremist version that we seem to be seeing a lot of these days.”

The movie’s Naseem keeps her Muslim faith despite eventually marrying a Sikh, something Kreuk sees as part of the movie’s message.

“It means a lot to me to have people understand — to have myself understand mostly — how varied our world is and that we can live in harmony with each of our belief systems intact.”

She’s on her cellphone calling from Granville Island, on a rare day off from both Smallville and Partition. As to that European spring vacation, she went to Italy and France with her best friend, and didn’t get as much of a rest as she thought she’d get.

“I probably won’t go back to any European country that airs Smallville until it’s over, that’s probably how it’s going to have to go,” she sighs. Hysterical fans are the problem.

“In Europe they freak out, they cry and they want to kiss you,” she says. “I like to travel normally. I don’t want to do anything too fancy. A lot of celebrities travel with a lot of money and can separate themselves from everybody else. I don’t want to have to do that, but I understand now why people would get to the place where they’re all weird and they can’t talk to anybody, and fly first-class everywhere. I don’t mind when people come up and talk, you know, it’s just when people freak out it’s hard to deal with.”

Coming back to Vancouver was a relief, she says.

“I feel like I’m in heaven because I can go sit in a restaurant without my sunglasses on and nobody cares. I still get recognized but it’s nothing I can’t handle.”