Daryl Hannah will never forget the first time she saw a girl take her clothes off professionally. "I'd never been into a strip club before," she says. "I was so scared I took guy friends with me. I got so sick, I vomited."
She was researching her role as a stripper in Michael Radford's Dancing at the Blue Iguana. It wasn't just the prospect of watching another woman strip that caused her stomach to rebel but the knowledge that she herself would have to perform in a similar fashion for the film.
Hannah is one of five actresses brought together by Radford to improvise a movie set in a Los Angeles strip club. She hung out and trained with real strippers in a couple of clubs and made a documentary, Strip Notes, on the process. Her film is revealing in its depiction of the stripping sisterhood as well as showing how the actresses dealt with their strip scenes in Blue Iguana.
"Everyone did it in their own way," says Hannah. "Some actresses took their clothes off in rehearsals. I did it by dancing in clubs in outof-the way places with not too many customers."
While she was performing in the clubs there was always the frisson that she might be recognised. Once word came round backstage that Quentin Tarantino was in the house, presumably for research purposes. "One time I was working and I was in disguise and a well-known actor walked past me as I was waiting backstage," she recalls. "But he was so concerned at looking at my body parts he would never have recognised me."
Hannah has already made an award-winning short film, The Last Supper, and is developing a script from a couple of short stories by Yeats. Since her breakthrough role as the replicant Pris in Blade Runner, she has suffered from a surfeit of roles as blonde arm-candy, but recent roles have proved more interesting. She has just finished playing a dead hermaphrodite angel in Northfork ("Where do you go to research that?") and is due to start on John Sayles's new film in August. She has also been training with martial-arts supremo Woo-Ping Yuen (Crouching Tiger and The Matrix) for her role in Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill.
"I'm a villain," she says with satisfaction. "A badass martial-arts assassin. I never really get to play that kind of role so it's great."
Hannah, whose inamorata is the magician David Blaine, says that her time in the clubs slightly curdled her attitude towards men. "The depressing thing is that at the end of the day the girls are still crawling on their hands and knees for a dollar bill. It grosses me out a little about men. But it definitely reinvigorated my acting and has given me a whole new way of working. It also made me a braver person. I am now more sensual and more sexy. I was shy and I'm still quite shy when it comes to sex and taking my clothes off." She smiles coyly. "I know a few tricks now."
?Strip Notes is on Channel 4, midnight, Sunday.
