Even though she's an accomplished actress, she's best known as a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model and the toothy smile behind a thousand Victoria's Secret catalog pages. But her modeling career was at best accidental. "I was really self-conscious and awkward in high school. I wanted nothing below my waist to exist. I always wore unpressed shirts around my butt -- I dressed like the Olsen twins!" she says. The subject of the Olsens is a curious one. Ashley and M-K have a place in Romijn's life, and they're emblematic of both everything great and all things terrible about show business. (One Pepper Dennis episode features an actress twin who is accused of murdering her sister. In homage to the Olsens, the character holds a Starbucks cup that's a little too heavy for her thin wrist. "I picked it up on the set one day -- they had the thing loaded down with 20 rocks!" Romijn says with a laugh.) On the other hand, the Olsens are old friends from her past. "They were on a show with my ex-husband," she says softly, referring to Full House, which featured her ex, mullet-hunk John Stamos. Though the official word on the breakup was that they parted amicably over career pressures -- he supposedly wanted kids, she wasn't ready -- she's uneasy talking about it. When I ask her what she learned from her marriage, she says, "You have to make unhappy decisions. You're no good to anybody if you're unhappy."
Keeping it real is as important to Romijn as it is natural. Raised in Berkeley by her Dutch craftsman father and linguist mother, her surroundings were humble but happily so. "We were poor -- I mean po'," she says. Mom was a big fan of language and musicals, so the house was filled with soundtracks. "I got the lead in every Gilbert and Sullivan production," she says, before launching into a pitch-perfect tongue twister from The Pirates of Penzance.
"I remember going on a casting for a show and being criticized by a designer who always fans himself. That guy, who wears sunglasses indoors, made me feel bad about having big boobs. Do I really want to be taken seriously by that kind of person?"
In 1991, her freshman year at UC Santa Cruz, a girlfriend gave her name to a model scout. "It was the time when supermodels were taking over the world, right in the middle of the holy trinity of Cindy, Christy and Naomi." Romijn was hesitant at first. "When the lady called to meet with me, I was like, 'I can't, I'm in the middle of finals.'" Romijn finally agreed to a meeting and was told to lose weight. "I'd put on the freshman fifteen. How could I not, with the cafeteria, all the Golden Grahams, doughnuts and soft-serve I could eat?" She swam every day, lost the weight and was summoned to Paris. But "I didn't make the best model in the world," Romijn admits. The unaffected girl from Berkeley found herself in the world of supermodels and superegos. "I remember going on a casting for a show and being criticized by a designer who always fans himself," she says. "That guy, who wears sunglasses indoors, made me feel bad about having big boobs. Do I really want to be taken seriously by that kind of person? I mean, I don't want to take myself that seriously."
By the mid-'90s she was in New York, living in the West Village, hanging out at Grange Hall and Peggy Sue's but bored out of her mind. "I became a high-end catalogue girl," she recalls. "I decided to switch it up." She'd been a guest on a lot of talk shows and had parlayed that into a gig on House of Style. "It was the only platform where a model could be taken seriously. It was a really great, safe, challenging place." She wrote a lot of her own scripts and started to think more seriously about acting. A few years later she landed the role of Mystique in X-Men, which, minus the seven hours of blue body makeup application a day, was a thrill. "I think anybody who's ever been ostracized can relate to the X-Men. I mean, it had been written during the civil-rights movement." Of her character's villainous turn, she says simply, "Some people go M.L.K., some go Malcolm X."
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