Trivia / Kate Beckinsale

• Awesome, Dear Boy: Stephen Sommers was reluctant to ask her to do Van Helsing, fearing it was too similar to Underworld (2003). However she signed on at once.
• Contractual Purity: Early on in her career, she took so many Action Girl roles precisely to stop people from thinking she was a "corset queen" in various period dramas. It had the effect of making people more familiar with her action movies, and therefore forgetting that she got her start in period dramas.
• Costume Backlash: She despised the corset she had to wear for Van Helsing and said she wanted to burn it at the end of filming.
• Dyeing for Your Art:
  • She was on a diet of chicken and broccoli to be able to fit into Selene's Spy Catsuit in Underworld.
  • She gained 20 lbs to play Ava Gardner in The Aviator.
  • She also had to gain 10 lbs for Van Helsing.
• Fake American: She is British, but in films is frequently cast as American characters due to her pulling off a flawless American accent. She gets to switch between the two in Total Recall (2012), where Lori starts off seemingly American as part of her cover, but switches to Kate's natural accent on a Face–Heel Turn.
• Funny Character, Boring Actor: Inverted. She's known for playing English Roses or humorless Action Girls. Offscreen she's a huge prankster and loves fart jokes.
• No Stunt Double: She performed her own stunts for Serendipity.
• Playing Against Type: Love & Friendship, an adaptation of Jane Austen's Lady Susan, has her playing a conniving manipulator who's also a rather cruel mother.
• Real-Life Relative: Her daughter Lily Mo Sheen plays the younger Selene in Underworld: Evolution, and appears as an extra in Click.
• Romance on the Set: She met her husband, director Len Wiseman, on the set of Underworld.
• Star-Derailing Role: Whiteout dented her momentum a bit, but the flopping of Total Recall (2012) seems to have killed her time as an A-lister, not helped by now being in her forties.
• Star-Making Role: Her role as the vampire hunter Selene in the film Underworld made her a star.
• Typecasting:
  • In both Van Helsing and Underworld (2003), she plays an Action Girl whose love interest turns into a werewolf in the third act.
  • She plays Americans in 1940s period pieces in The Aviator and Pearl Harbor.
• Underage Casting: In Click, she plays Donna across twenty years.
• Wag the Director: Underworld seems to be constantly trying to get Selene nude - with a shower scene in the first film, and Selene having Full-Frontal Assault in Awakening (albeit with Shoulders-Up Nudity and Toplessness from the Back). Kate however prefers not to do nudity, so the scene in the first film was taken out completely, the one in Awakening was lessened to Selene finding her suit immediately after escaping, and the sex scene in Evolution having fades to avoid showing her fully nude.
• What Could Have Been: She nearly got the role of Rachel Keller in The Ring but producers felt she looked too young, and cast Naomi Watts.