Immediately following a screening of Resident Evil: Apocalypse, the eternally effervescent Milla Jovovich awaits FilmStew, eager to hear a reaction. All that gruesome flesh eating would seem to make people want to become vegetarians, she is told. “Yeah,” she laughs. “Doesn’t it make your tastebuds tingle?”

Tall and lean and wearing a smile from ear to ear, Jovovich is younger looking in person than one might expect. Clad in jeans and orange Nikes, with a sleeveless striped tank top, she sits cross-legged on a conference room chair and waves her hands about wildly, peppering her statements liberally with “like”, “dude” and “cool”. If it seems like the actress has been around forever, it’s because she has: The green-eyed beauty began modeling at age nine, has been working steadily in television and then movies since the late Eighties, and has appeared on the cover of more than a hundred magazines worldwide. But she’s only twenty-eight, as she’s quick to remind you; that made her familiar enough with youth culture to accept the leading role in 2002’s Resident Evil, a relatively low-budgeted film based on a videogame. One hundred million dollars later, Jovovich is back as Alice once again.

“It was crazy,” she says of the physically demanding role. “I thought I did a lot in the first movie, but I didn’t even know what they had in store for me for this one. It was really one of those surprises when I came in for my first day of rehearsal and I saw the scope of the choreography. It was just a little bit daunting.”

That choreography is built from the plot point that Jovovich’s character is now superhuman after having been injected with a mysterious virus that had given her amazing powers. Now, not only can she spin a mean kick to the face, but Alice can also run down the sides of buildings, leap long distances, and command a wide array of weaponry.

“I trained for four months, five or six hours a day, six days a week, and I still don’t think I was as ready as I should have been,” she remembers. “We were rehearsing right up until the day we did [some] fights. It was a lot. I had something like eight hundred moves throughout the movie to memorize.”<./p>

“There was so much crazy stuff,” she continues. “The action I love, the martial arts I love, because that stuff I love to do in my real life. I prefer martial arts to the gym any day of the week, because that stuff is fun for me.”

“The scariest part was dealing with certain fears I’ve had ever since I was a kid, like a fear of heights and a fear of small places. When I had to scale down that five-story building, oh my God, it was like six a.m., negative seven below, in Toronto in the winter and I’m just hanging there.”

At one point, things got a bit too real. “I got a crazy injury during rehearsal,” she remembers. While performing a stunt, the actress hurt her leg and created fears that the injury might delay the shoot. Together with director Alexander Witt and his stunt choreographers, however, Jovovich came up with a plan.

“We had to turn some of my kicks around when I couldn’t use one leg. But it’s cool, we worked through it.”

Jovovich is still amazed by the success of the first Resident Evil film, and gives her brother Marco all the credit for talking her into taking the role that has defined her young career. “I’m not a big gamer myself, but I have a younger brother,” she explains. “He keeps me in touch with that world, because he’s a fanatic. When he was like thirteen, and I did the first movie, the reason why I did it was because we play that game for hours every day.”

Jovovich may play the Resident Evil games, but she does it without ever actually touching a controller. “I love playing with Marco because I can’t actually control the thing – he does the controlling part and I tell him what to do,” she laughs. “It took us like three days to get out of the Queen’s Chamber on number three.”

“It was literally ridiculous – I was calling all my guy friends my age, going, ‘How do you get out of the Queen’s Chamber? C’mon man, you’ve got to hook me up!”

Jovovich laughs again, a great staccato laugh that starts out as a grin, then a giggle, then builds to its full crescendo. She tilts her head back, spins her chair, and glances around the room wide-eyed. She considers herself to be equal parts actress, musician (she’s recorded two full albums and appeared on several movie soundtracks), and clothing designer (she models her Jovovich-Hawk bikinis in the latest issue of Maxim). As such, she harnesses an eye for beauty that showed her the difference between Resident Evil and other video games.

“The first time I saw it, I thought, ‘Hmmm…that looks really beautiful,’” she remembers. “And the framing and the colors are really dark. I said ‘What are you playing?’, and he told me it was a game called Resident Evil.”

“The next thing you know, half an hour later, I’m still sitting there and watching it, watching him go through alleyways and breaking into places and suddenly I’m like, ‘Wait, you just passed a door and didn’t open it. Go back there and open that door.’ Before you know it, he’d try to get up to eat and I wouldn’t let him.”

The beauty of the game translates well to the screen, Jovovich suggests, and the character of Alice has allowed her to live out all her greatest butt-kicking fantasies. “We wanted to focus on more high-impact martial arts,” she says of the sequel. “So Tae-Kwon Do was a major element of that. In the first movie, Alice’s big kick to the dog was something that people really loved, and we wanted to take advantage of that and really have her lay down some great kicks.”

With her sleeveless shirt revealing some toned biceps, Jovovich looks like she could jump up on the table and start tossing zombies around right now. And with actresses like Halle Berry, Angelina Jolie and Uma Thurman making such intensive training the norm, one has to wonder who would win in a fight between all these karate-chopping actresses.

Asked for her thoughts, Jovovich just tilts her head back and laughs one last time. “We don’t have actress spar sessions in bikinis in our free time or anything like that,” she says, articulating the unspoken male fantasy. She may not know for sure whether she could beat up those other actresses, but there are about three hundred zombies who would argue otherwise.

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