Women & Sex

British bombshell Lena Headey fights terminators for a living. It’s the perfect role for a girl who grew up defending herself with a smart mouth, a sharp wit, and a mean right cross.

By: Jennifer Wolff; Photographs: Nino Muñoz
[ Updated: Feb 18, 2009 - 12:01:13 PM ]

The first time Lena Headey shot a man in the balls, she cried. She wasn’t even looking when she fired the gun. But the sheer brutality of it all—the hard steel against the interior of her knuckle, the violent shudder in her groin after pulling the trigger, and the sound, that deafening, ear-breaking sound—was too overwhelming. At the very moment she should have focused on her target’s chest, she turned away, the marauder in front of her suddenly a eunuch.

“It scared me,” says Headey, 34, in an accent that glides between British working-class and the Queen’s English. “I thought, My God, here’s a gun and there’s a life, and you shoot the gun and there ends the life.” The target in this case was a paper assailant at the shooting range where Fox Television sends its action stars in training, and where for the last many weeks the actress has tried to appease her fear of weaponry. At the very least, the instruction has taught Headey to look like she knows what she’s doing: On Fox’s midseason entry Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a prologue to the Terminator movies, she wields pistols, shotguns, and heavy artillery like a modern-day Bonnie Parker. As the embattled mom protecting her son—and the human race—from killer robots, Headey seems completely at home, albeit not at all at peace.

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“[Playing with guns] is not something I’d do on a day off,” she says over a salad of prosciutto, melon, and figs served al fresco at Pace, a stylish organic Italian eatery in Los Angeles, where Headey and her groom of six months have set up house since moving from London in July. “I don’t really understand why Americans have such access to them and why they shoot them for sport.” Headey’s father, I point out, was a police officer: You’d think having a cop for a dad might have inured the actress to the general idea of firearms. “Are you kidding?” she asks incredulously. “He was a British cop. He didn’t have a gun; he had a f--king stick. He’d run after people, and it was like, ‘I’m going to hit you with my four-foot stick, so you better be scared and give up that lady’s handbag.’ ”