Movies
'Godsend' actress mulls views on cloning

By Mike Szymanski
Zap2it.com

KERRY HAYES Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, center, and Greg Kinnear, right, star in the thriller "Godsend" as parents who decide to clone their young son after he's killed in a car accident.

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Model-actress Rebecca Romijn-Stamos spends much of her downtime taking hikes with her dogs.

She adores her two German shepherds and her toy poodle, and now, after doing the movie "Godsend" — a thriller about cloning — she wonders if she'd ever take advantage of the technology if it became available.

"I have an 11-year-old German shepherd at home and he's the love of my life. It breaks my heart to think about losing him, (but) if I cloned him, would it really be the same dog? It doesn't seem right, yet — it's a little scary," she says.

"Godsend" is a thriller about a couple (Romijn-Stamos and Greg Kinnear) raising a young son in the city. When their son is killed in an accident, a mysterious doctor (Robert De Niro) offers them the chance to replace him with a clone, and they move to the country to raise their cloned son — with horrifying results.

Romijn-Stamos says she was a bit nervous about working with De Niro at first, but found him to be friendly. But, she says, "He's not perfect. We'd have a couple afternoons where we'd be losing the light and only had a few minutes to get the last shot, and it was his shot. With that much pressure sometimes you lose it and fall into that conniption-fit-type laughter. He did that a couple of times."

Romijn-Stamos, who recently announced she was separating from her husband of five years, actor John Stamos, says she hopes to have children of her own someday.

"I would like to have children within the next four or five years, certainly," she says.

"I doubt that I'll ever be a mother of a cloned child, and certainly hope I won't be. ... I can't imagine how painful it would be if I did lose (a child)," Romijn-Stamos says, adding that she understands why her character decides to clone her son and becomes super-protective.

The actress has mixed feelings about cloning in real life.

"It's far from being a perfect science and certainly this movie touches upon that idea," she says. "I don't think the idea of cloning human beings is a very good idea, but we met this doctor when working on this movie who's working on cloning organs and he's getting really close, and I think that's great for health reasons."
 
Romijn-Stamos says her roles in "Godsend" and her other recent film, "The Punisher," are different aspects of her own personality, but she appreciates the similarities of the characters.

"It was nice to play a really soft, normal girl for a change for both characters and ... (not) have to sit in the makeup chair, especially coming off the 'X-Men' movies and 'Femme Fatale'" — movies in which she played characters who were much more action-oriented.

Romijn-Stamos say she's looking forward to recreating her evil, blue-skinned character Mystique for the third X-Men film, but hasn't yet seen a script. "I'm dreading the makeup part, but nothing else," she says.