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"  Unless your household is in Copenhagen, CONNIE NIELSEN is probably not a household name. This is puzzling. After all, it&amp;#039;s not as though the thirty-seven-year-old Dane has shied away from splashy roles. She&amp;#039;s played the exotic Princess Lucilla in Gladiator, the photogenic Nina Yorkin in One Hour Photo, and the demonic Christabella in The Devil&amp;#039;s Advocate. And yet I&amp;#039;d wager that Dana Plato has more name recognition. Why? Two theories: 1) The name itself. For whatever quirk of linguistic fate, &amp;quot;Connie Nielsen&amp;quot; just doesn&amp;#039;t stick in your noggin. 2) Her ever-changing hair, which she reinvents approximately every thirty-six seconds. If I hadn&amp;#039;t just seen her (in this month&amp;#039;s The Hunted, a thriller with Tommy Lee Jones and the man on the cover of this magazine), I may not have recognized her when she walked into the restaurant for our meeting, her streaky hair chopped short and boyish. After the obligatory apologies for her tardiness, we settled into a corner table, where she promptly began smoking like a Viking. One hour and four cigarettes later, here&amp;#039;s what we&amp;#039;d covered.   \u2014 BRENDAN VAUGHAN  ESQUIRE I&amp;#039;ve heard you&amp;#039;re extremely multilingual. Which languages do you speak?  CONNIE NIELSEN Italian, French, German, English, Danish, all the other Scandinavian languages, and a little Spanish as well. ESQ Fantastic. Which one has the best profanity?  CN I would have to say Italian. It has this great snap to it, you know? And they have these really colorful phrases like &amp;quot;Puttana Eva.&amp;quot; It means &amp;quot;Eve is a slut.&amp;quot; As in the biblical Eve.   ESQ In Danish, how would you say \u2014  CN Oh, I can&amp;#039;t. I grew up a good girl and I never learned how to swear in Danish. [She struggles with a bottle of Heinz.] Okay, when are they gonna make this easy? We have high-speed Internet, and still we have the same problem with the fucking ketchup bottle.  ESQ Tell me about a Danish tradition that our readers might find amusing. CN Well, we do Christmas a little differently. For example, on December 23 we put some rice porridge in the attic.  ESQ Naturally. CN The porridge is for the nisser, which are these little gnomes that live up there. They dress in little red panties and gray sweaters, and they have really gnarly faces and overgrown ears with hair sprouting out. You need to make sure they&amp;#039;re happy. If they&amp;#039;re not happy, they&amp;#039;ll take away all the presents.  ESQ I see. Let&amp;#039;s talk movies. You just finished shooting The Great Raid, in which you play an American nurse at a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in World War II. Sounds like a difficult role. CN It was physically exhausting, yes. My character is lonely and in danger and morally compromised because she&amp;#039;s risking her own life and everybody else&amp;#039;s life to save these prisoners of war. So I basically cried for two months straight.  ESQ Cameron Diaz always talks about how much fun she has while making a movie. Think she&amp;#039;s lying?  CN Dude, she sure looks like she&amp;#039;s always having fun. But I&amp;#039;d like to have seen her try it with this role. Fun with Japanese torture! ESQ Read anything good lately? CN I love to read. I&amp;#039;ll read the back of a shampoo bottle. I was blown away by Kate Millett&amp;#039;s Sexual Politics, in which she analyzes the sexual politics of Norman Mailer and D. H. Lawrence. It&amp;#039;s one of the wittiest, most insightful intellectual exercises I&amp;#039;ve ever read. You should read it, since you work for a men&amp;#039;s magazine.  ESQ I will. In that same vein, I&amp;#039;ve heard John Updike described as &amp;quot;a penis with a thesaurus.&amp;quot; CN Ooooh, that&amp;#039;s harsh. That may be a little harsh. ESQ For some unfathomable reason, you&amp;#039;re not as well-known in this country as your r\u00E9sum\u00E9 would suggest. Does that bother you? CN No, it&amp;#039;s never been about that for me. I live in New York City; I feel like a tourist in Hollywood. You can choose to operate within the system or a little bit outside it. I don&amp;#039;t need public adoration to feel worthwhile in my job. The Women We Love Gallery, more than 100 women strong: esquire.com/women. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a1726/esq0303-mar-nielson-rev-2/>