Vaugier's everywhere: big screen, video, TV
The Province, July 2002

Your average actor starts to get jittery about 10 minutes after the last job ended but Vancouver's Emmanuelle Vauiger is laughing easily at a downtown cafe a couple of weeks after her most recent movie. She just finished work as a woman wronged in the thriller The Wicked Season, which followed on the heels of a comedic spin for 13 episodes of the WB comedy My Guide to Becoming a Rock Star.

"The movie is a complete 180 from the series," says Vaugier. "I had dirt on my face for the entire shoot, did a lot of fighting, running and kicking. That was realy gruelling, so I'm kind of enjoying not working now."

We'll be seeing more of Vaugier while she's kicking back. She plays a latina pop star in the Candian comedy Suddenly Naked with Wendy Crewson, in theatres this month. And her rowdy tumble with Josh Hartnett in the comedy 40 Days and 40 Nights comes to video in September.

Vaugier spent a week playing Hartnett's spitfire one-night stand. "It's the most unromantic sex scene you could possibly shoot, with 50 people standing around, three days of choreographing, rehearsing where we're going to fall-and which blankets were going to go where because you couldn't show anything."

Basically, her character gets ticked when he fakes an orgasm. "Josh is a very funny guy and some of the stuff in the scene is so over the top and ridiculous. you can hear snickers behind the camera. You're trying not to laugh or crack up because then you blow the take."

One scene not in the final cut is when Vaugier inadvertanly set Hartnett's shirt on fire. "I go take his shirt off and just fling it. There's candles lit all around the bed. We're completely oblivious to what's happening - I guess the shirt had landed on one of the candles."

The pair only noticed after a crewman's deadpan "Fire, fire, fire..."

Vaugier says she never thought of herself as funny but Stuart Aikins, the Vancouver casting director who put her in 40 Days, never had any doubts.

"Her scene's a riot 'cause she's got great chops in that area," says Aikins, who first spotted her in the mid-90's. "Ive always thought she was an exceptional talent."

She started acting as a teen, after modelling in Japan during breaks from Magee secondary. Vaugier now divides her time between homes in Yaletown and L.A.

The WB series, My Guide to Becoming a Rock Star, paired her with Oliver Hudson, celebrity offspring of Goldie Hawn and Kurt Russell. It has been cancelled.

Still, it was hard to beat her experience viewing the series' first episode. Co-star Shannon Tweed hosted a party at the L.A. mansion she shares with hubby Gene Simmons of KISS. "He had these KISS cookies with his face on them, the tongue and stuff. I took two. It was just before his new magazine Tongue came out. "

And the real Simmons tongue?

"I don't think he flashed the tongue that night. I'm sure he would on request but I was too shy to ask.

Written by Glen Schaefer