As Nikita, she’s the meanest and leanest star on TV, but what really motivates Maggie Q and just why does she want to visit Ireland? Donal O’Donoghue meets the actress in Monte Carlo
Young girls of ten or 11 come up to me and say stuff like, ‘I really like your show’ or ‘I want to be like you’ and I’m thinking, ‘Huh?’” Maggie Q raises her eyes to the heavens and laughs. “It scares the s**t out of me that anyone would want to be like Nikita.”
Nikita is a rogue assassin and the titular star of the US TV series. If the name rings a few bells, that’s not surprising as the character has been kicking butt for some time: from the 1990 Luc Besson movie to the US remake, The Assassin (1993) and the spin-off TV series, La Femme Nikita (1997). Now we have Maggie Q’s version, an Asian-American with looks to die for and moves that kill.
If this all sounds like a slick chop socky cartoon, then Q would argue otherwise. “I never wanted Nikita to be a superhero”, she says. “A hero who is not flawed doesn’t interest me. Somebody who continues to make mistakes interests people because that’s all of us.”
Maggie Q – or Margaret Denise Quigley as her birth certificate has it – admits that she has made a few wrong turns in a hard-knock career that has taken her from the US to Asia and back again; and from martial arts fodder like Naked Weapon and Manhattan Midnight to Hollywood juggernauts such as Mission: Impossible III and Die Hard 4.0. “I was 18 when I went to Asia with $20 in my pocket”, she says. “I had no friends, no contacts, no anything. It was a time of exploration and I was very poor for many years. But I believe that to really make it, there are two things that you have to do. You have to start poor and you have to make a few really bad movies that you never want to admit you’ve done. I’ve done both! I believe it keeps you humble forever.”
Humble forever? Well, maybe not, but the 32-year-old is smart and talented and, with Nikita on primetime, she’s certainly made it. Now she’s at the Monte Carlo TV Festival spreading the word and not taking any lip from anybody (not that anyone is likely to give it!). She’s dressed demurely or at least demure compared to the gigantic Nikita poster that fills the wall space behind her. Our scantily clad heroine sports a dramatic tattoo of a phoenix rising on her left hip, but Q is oblivious to her backdrop and the ink work, which is for real.
“Feel free to take a croissant”, she says, looking like someone who never ate a bun in her entire life. Then she takes a shine to my recorder. “I love this”, she says, tapping the device. “This is the coolest thing.” And you’re thinking ‘does this girl get out often’?
Quigley grew up in Hawaii, the youngest of five children. “I believe that my father’s father was Irish”, she says. “My father kept his Irish last name, Quigley. People still think that I can’t speak English for some reason. It’s bizarre. I’ve never been to Ireland but it’s one of the things I want to do. I know my Asian roots, having lived there for some time, but I haven’t done the Irish side yet. And I’m doing it, believe me, I’m going there soon.”
You better believe her. Just after high school, Quigley upped sticks and headed way out East. First stop was Tokyo and a brief stint as a model, then a very short stopover in Taipei before she settled in Hong Kong. Under the guidance (and tutelage) of martial arts superstar Jackie Chan, the actress was groomed for Asian box-office greatness. Margaret Quigley became Maggie Q (courtesy of a Hong Kong newspaper) and she learned the moves (“I couldn’t touch my toes back then!”) that would pay dividends when she finally got her own TV show.
In the first season, the die is cast for Nikita, who escapes the shadowy agency (Division) that made her into a killing machine and now wants her dead. It’s all great fun, with Maggie Q kicking six bells out of anyone dumb enough to cross her path. “Nikita makes mistakes in the first season, decisions that might bite her in the ass in the second season”, she says. “But we’ll see.” Q’s own favourite TV show is the incredible Breaking Bad, perhaps the most original series on TV anywhere right now. “I can’t sleep at night thinking about the next episode”, she says. “It’s so perfectly off-beat and strange. Sometimes, when I’m watching that show on cable, I’m thinking I wish I was on cable because there’s so much more you can do there. You can be much more quirky and dark and weird on cable.”
But Nikita is not without its darkness or depth. Q is a huge fan of Luc Besson’s original film, which she believes birthed a new kind of female hero, a notion the TV series taps into. “In the ’80s, we had the tough women with muscles as played by Sigourney Weaver and Linda Hamilton”, she says. “In the ’90s, Besson gave us the flawed female hero which, in my opinion, we never had before. This was the hero who was incredibly vulnerable and dark and not OK. When you play Nikita right, there’s that balance between her toughness and her vulnerability. Those are the people you fall in love with. You have a healthy respect for those people but there’s also something that eats at your heart. I think that is very Nikita.”
Nikita is a very rare example of an Asian-American getting top-billing on a primetime US TV show. “It’s both amazing and horrifying to me at the same time but I’m very proud of that”, says Q. So does this mark a sea-change in Hollywood? “God I hope it does”, she says. “Warner Bros said they were not looking for the right blonde actress or the right blue-eyed actress, they were looking for the person who was going to embody the spirit of this character and bring her to life. Nikita has been played by Caucasian leads in the past. I am not the obvious choice for this character, so this thinking outside the box is happening in Hollywood, but it has been a long time coming. It shouldn’t be about your ethnicity, it should be about whether you’re the right actress. But as we know, life doesn’t always work out like that.”
It certainly doesn’t. Not long after we spoke, Q was offered a part in a new indie movie, but it wasn’t the female lead or even close: it was for the Asian nurse who has a few walk-on and off scenes. Q passed. With Nikita, she is very much hands-on – and not just in busting up the baddies (she does most of her own stunts). “I work very closely with the writers”, she says. “I’m sure there are situations where the actor walks into the room and they’re thinking ‘oh no’, but we do get along pretty well and for the first season it’s been a nice marriage. It’s not like me coming in and shouting ‘No, I don’t like that! Chop! Chop’”.
Inevitably, there’s no way you can avoid the obvious question, writ large on the eight by ten foot poster that has been staring down at us all this time. The word is that back when she was a struggling actress in Hong Kong, Maggie Q would tag along with a friend when she visited a local fortune teller. Each time the mystic would compare her to a bird. “The bird of strength, the phoenix rising, means a lot to me”, she says. “I also believe that this life is not our final destination and that we are continuing to grow and evolve. So that tattoo will describe my life. Maybe when I’m 80, I will regret it but for now it’s OK.”
* Nikita is on Sky Living, Wednesday
