Maggie Q "Priest" Interview by Fred Topel

If you need a hot babe who can kick vampire butt, you hire Maggie Q. Seems obvious, right? Why would you even audition anyone else? For Priest, Q won the role of Priestess, Priestess being the female form of Priest in case you were wondering. While all the other Priestess hopefuls tried to show off their cleavage, Q impressed director Scott Stewart in her street clothes.

“We did the casting thing and had a lot of young, very attractive, very well known young actresses,” Stewart said. “They’re coming in and they’re all wearing these cat suits and all these things. They would wear boots and stuff. Maggie came in wearing ratty jeans and a faded Beastie Boys t-shirt. She had an ice tea or diet coke, she walked in and was like, ‘I think I dressed wrong for this.’”
Nope, Maggie. You look awesome in anything. “First of all, you’re right, the heels and the hair, and there was all this smokey eye [make-up] happening and boobage, which I couldn’t do, even if I wanted to, so I was jealous,” she recalled with Stewart. “I came and thought I was at the wrong place because, last time I checked, the role was for a Priest. So why would you do the boobage and the hair and the heels? I was mortified. I was like, ‘What is happening right now?’”

Stewart thinks the other auditioners were copying Underworld, which is that other movie where hot women in tight spandex fight monsters. Q was just thinking of nailing the test scene.

 “What matters is what you bring to the table,” she said. “It’s hard to find your inner truth in a little room with four people that you don’t know. I think all this [exterior], I don’t know what that’s about. I don’t know why they do it, I don’t know what it’s about. Obviously as well by the way, the point is if you’re in a room with a director who understands at a certain level what he wants to bring on screen, none of this matters. [The costumers] make you into whatever it is that they’re going to make you into.”

So without her homemade vamp suit, Q conveyed the reality of being a vampire hunting priestess in a Hollywood boardroom. “We did two scenes,” Stewart said. “One was the scene where she hands the cross back to Priest and she just took us there. You’re just immediately there. You’re just there. You’re like oh, okay, this feels like a movie and it feels like a movie that takes place in this kind of alternate heightened reality or alternate reality. You’re there.”