No headpine

JADE Pinkett Smith was disappointed when she lost out on the role of Trinity in the original Matrix movie. But clearly Pinkett Smith made an impression on writer-director brothers, Andy and Larry Wachowski.

They wrote the role of resistance fighter Niobe especially for her for the next two chapters of the trilogy, that concludes with The Matrix Revolutions.

The 32-year-old African-American actress received the news about Niobe when she was nine months pregnant with her second child to superstar actor husband Will Smith.

"I got a call saying the Wachowskis wanted to see me, they had a role for me. I was like, 'you've got to be kidding'," she says. "I went in and said to them 'listen, we're going to work it out, you need not worry about me, I will get you what you need'."

Pinkett Smith scaled back on her work commitments after she married Smith in 1997 and they had a son, Jaden, now five, so there were some hard decisions to be made when the Matrix job came along.

"We really miss being together. When I got pregnant with our daughter I'd promised Will I'd chill out and put my career on hold," she explains. "But when the Matrix offer came it's the one thing I couldn't turn down and Will understood that."

To allow her to see through her pregnancy with daughter Willow, now two, Pinkett Smith's more action-packed scenes were pushed to the end of the nine-month shoot in Australia. They even rearranged shooting so she could be with the children while her husband shot Men In Black II.

Interestingly, Will had initially had talks to play Neo in the first Matrix, a part that eventually went to Keanu Reeves. But there's no inter-family jealousy about her getting back into the hit project, says Pinkett Smith. "There's no rubbing faces in anything, you know he's just really happy for me to be able to come back round again," she says.

"I'm just so happy to be even thought about for the second and third movies and that they actually created this Niobe character for me. That in itself has been very flattering." A lot of physical training was required for the film, with Pinkett Smith putting on 15lbs of muscle and bench pressing up to 160lbs.

With lots of action movements - mostly filmed against blank screens to allow backgrounds to be put in later - and high wire work, it wasn't easy, especially for a new mum. "There was a lot of physical work, throwing kicks, running, climbing walls and fighting with nobody. You name it, I did it. You're doing scenes that are just in this big empty space," she says. There's even a tie-in video game for which Pinkett Smith had to endure a month of facial capture as well as doing new dialogue.

The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions were shot back-to-back, and everyone involved in the films had to look on it as just one massive project.

"That was just part of the job because all the stories are so intertwined with each other," she says. "It was sometimes hard to remember what goes where. My first day on the set, after the 26th take, I looked at Laurence Fishburne and it was like 'what is going on?'.

"The thing is, I just had to move out of the way instead of coming with these preconceived notions of what the scene was going to be."

With supporting roles in Ali and The Nutty Professor, Pinkett-Smith made her eye-catching screen debut a decade ago in Menace II Society. Next up she's joining Tom Cruise in the thriller Collateral. With her husband's film career in full flight, Pinkett Smith says her priority is still her family. ''When I was single and young I wanted to take on the world, I still do, just in a different way. Kids just put things in perspective.

''I do love acting but you can't have two superstars in the family, and you know we already have one.''

* The Matrix Revolutions (15) is now showing

Published: 06/11/2003