T'anks to Petty…

Lori Petty vaults into a Hollywood hot seat this month In Rachel Talalay's Tank Girl. The $30 million special-effects flick promises to be a mildly bowdlerized adaptation of the cult English comic book created by cartoonist Jamie Hewlett and writer Alan Martin in 1988. However, you can bet on Petty, hitherto best known as Geena Davis's truculent kid sis in A League of Their Own, to bring some of her trademark spunk to the role of the eponymous post-feminist, poet-Sinead Valkyrie Rebecca Buck. Set in 2033, Tank Girl tells a Mad Max-ish story of a gang of apocalypse survivors - some half-man, half-kangaroo mutants - persecuted by Malcolm McDowell's ruling Department of Water and Power. Shortly before the movie's opening, I called Its sweet-voiced, apparently recumbent star in L.A. and discovered there was nothing petty about Lori. GRAHAM FULLER: What've you been doing today?

LORI PETTY: This morning I got up and took my three-mile walk on the beach. Beautiful. We had a lot of rain, and now it's very clear and sunny and cool. Then I rode my bicycle to get coffee and came back and lay on my bed, waiting for you to call me.

GF: So, Lori, what made you think you'd be the right person to play a bald, belching, smart-mouthed, futuristic, kangaroo-shagging warrior punkette?

LP: Because it was a blast! The script for Tank Gift was a lot funnier than anything else you ever read in Hollywood. There was a freedom, a lack of restraint. Most female roles in Hollywood movies are very one-dimensional. It's like, "Who do I fuck and when do I fuck them?" But there's never been a character like Tank Girl who's allowed to be free, and who's the boss without being a bitch or cold and manipulative. She's just honest and out there.

GF: Why you, though? Why were you right to play Tank Girl?

LP: I don't know how to answer that. [pauses] Because I like to have fun. I like to dance and laugh and kiss and jump around and blow things up and make jokes. It's all about fun and sex and laughing and freedom.

SF: Speaking as a guy, I find her a little scary.

LP: Why'S that? Because she cut her boyfriend's arms and legs off that one time?

GF: That isn't such a recommendation. But she's definitely sexy; there's no doubt about that.

LP: She isn't trying to be sexy. That's what I think is so sexy about her. Her sexiness comes, I think, from her freedom and openness.

GF: Wonder Woman and Supergirl were so sanitized in comparison to Tank Girl, who could barely have existed fifteen years ago. Something in the world has changed to make her possible, and I'm curious to know what you think that is.

LP: I think that men and women are breaking down their differences and realizing they're more like each other than not. Men aren't objectifying women as much as they used to. There's maybe less male fear of women, and less fear means less hate and anger. Hopefully, everyone's growing up. That's a big "hopefully" - the need for control is huge. But the men who created Tank Girl didn't create her like they own her. She's just a woman with a bald head and Band-Aids on her knees who they would like to hang out with and who they think is fun and sexy. She doesn't have to be Farrah Fawcett.

GF: When you started the film, did you immediately become her?

LP: I did, actually. There was a Xeroxed copy of her face in the script, and just from seeing her looking up from the page, I knew her right away. I understood the artist's intent.

GF: So you just dived straight in?

LP: They called me up and wanted me to start right away, because they had a casting change. I had no choice but to jump right in, but that's kinda good. Who needs to overanalyze a comic-book character?

GF: Well, I do a bit. Do you think Tank Girl's got any neuroses?

LP: I don't know. The fear of running out of beer? [laughs]

GF: So she's pretty together?

LP: As together as she wants to be. I mean, everything's fucked - it's the future, and Malcolm McDowell's character owns all the water and he's making slaves out of everyone he can find, putting them to work to dig for water. Tank Girl tells him to kiss her ass because she'd rather he kill her than make a slave out of her. You won't need to have your shit together in the future, you'll just need to take care of your friends, and that's all that Tank Girl's doing.

GF: Many of the ironies and obscure English pop-cultural references in the comics were understandably left out of the script because American audiences just wouldn't get them. I'm curious to know if you did things yourself to preserve the flavor of the comics, or did you just follow the script?

LP: No. I came to Tank Girl my way. That's your job as the actor, It is a big-budget American movie, so yes, they did cut out a lot of those sub-tie ironies. But at the same time, we have a definite flavor in America that the rest of the world is quite attuned to. We're not amazingly hip, we're just flailing, crazy adolescents. [laughs] Tank Girl's definitely got her own style - you've never seen a girl like her before in a movie. She's just her own living being. She can't really help it.