Sofia Boutella says her Mummy character in new blockbuster is ‘the definition of a feminist’
Actress who plays title role, previously played by a male actor, Boris Karloff, in The Mummy sees her character Princess Ahmanet as ‘strong, powerful and opinionated’ and says ‘I love that they gave this to a woman’
Sofia Boutella had a nightmare day shooting scenes for The Mummy in which her Princess Ahmanet is dealt tough justice, ancient Egypt-style, for killing her pharaoh dad and baby brother. She’s entombed alive in a sarcophagus.
Boutella’s eyes popped wide through holes in the head-to-toe mummification bandages as she was placed into the stone coffin.
“There was a lot of fear, I didn’t need much acting to look frightened,” recalls Boutella, whose first language is French. “It was weird, I felt really dispowered. I don’t know if that word exists, did I just make that up?”
“Dispower” is not a concept the 35-year-old Algerian-born actress dwells on as the title star of The Mummy (in cinemas on Thursday). Boutella’s Ahmanet is the force putting fear into London and Tom Cruise’s soldier of fortune Nick Morton when he accidentally awakens her after 5,000 years.
Ahmanet’s impressive arrival thrusts Boutella’s Mummy into a mighty woman weekend at the box office along with Gal Gadot’s blockbuster Wonder Woman, which dominated with US$100 million-plus in North America alone last weekend. Both characters follow wildly different screen paths, but are owned entirely by powerful female performances.
Just having the mummy cast as a woman in Universal’s new “Dark Universe” signals a major change from the original 1932 movie, which starred Boris Karloff.
