Kate Beckinsale is back with another action film starring role, fans of the “Underworld” franchise will be excited to hear. In “Jolt” she plays sardonic Lindy, prone to bouts of murderous rage so extreme that she has to shock herself with an electrode device to control her impulses. When the man she loves is murdered, Lindy decides to embrace her anger and seek revenge. As Beckinsale explains in conversation here with confidante and fellow actress Molly Shannon, “Jolt” may have the tropes we’d expect from a Hollywood action flick, but it’s “actually pretty subversive”. This is, after all, a heroine wholly resisting the pressure to be polite and acquiescing to dangerous men. Lindy also has the dry British sense of humour which Beckinsale shares, to the extent that some of her own writing crept into the script.
“It’s really hard to get a female character with a full spectrum of colour into this kind of action movie, and I’ve done a couple of them. It's a fairly macho film company, but then we have a female director, we have me, and we have a really great cast. So it did feel like a sneaky, groundbreaking move to be able to get this incredibly colourful woman into a movie like that.”
Here, the two actresses discuss Beckinsale’s role in the action-comedy, why she finds Instagram liberating after years of people speaking for her, and how arriving in Hollywood as a young single mother helped, rather than hindered, her career.
