The superhero drama of Watchmen is a true change of pace for Malin Akerman, a veteran of romantic comedies such as The Heartbreak Kid and 27 Dresses. In fact, when our Brian Truitt caught up with her recently, she was finishing up another one, Couple’s Retreat, with Vince Vaughn, Jon Favreau and Jason Bateman. It was the idea of going out of her comfort zone, though, that attracted Akerman to Watchmen. She play the Silk Spectre, a latex-clad heroine who’s brought up by her mom to fight crime, is romantically involved with two of the main characters, and is inextricably linked to yet another. “Yeah, she’s got a lot of emotional baggage,” Ackerman, 31, quips.

With all the drama your character is involved in, did it feel like a true comic book movie to you?
Not at all. We are real people — it just happens to be that the career we chose are those of vigilantes. I’ve never gone out at 3 in the morning and knocked out 10 guys in an alley in a latex outfit. That just isn’t my thing. But treating that as though it were a career, she really does become just a regular woman going through emotions and situations that any woman can or would. Other than the fact that she’s dating a superhuman man at first, of course. That’s another odd situation.

Yes, Dr. Manhattan, with whom your character travels to Mars.
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the budget to go all the way to Mars. The CGI was all new [for me] and a really cool thing to watch. I had no idea how they were going to pull it off. And in comes Billy Crudup in this crazy white pajama outfit with blue LED lights all over and dots on his face. It was pretty tough to keep a serious face for the first week. Really, everyone must have laughed in his face a few times. But it was an amazing concept: We needed that blue reflection on us to in order to make it look real for us.

So, back to the latex costume. How was squeezing into that?
We went into a specialty latex store where they have these cool, crazy outfits. I got into the changing room and I had to put baby powder all over my body in order to get the latex on. It was a little bit of foreshadowing of the next six months of putting this thing on every day. I came out and said, “This looks absolutely amazing but holy [cow] this is gonna be crazy to wear every day.” I don’t know how people do it, people with latex fetishes. It looks fantastic but it’s not the most comfortable thing.

Did you ever get used to it?
I was so happy when you’d have an extra half hour in the morning and my breakfast could digest before I put on this crazy outfit. We got it down to clockwork, but it took a good 25 minutes to a half hour to get into it. There were several pieces to it and sliding it on, and it really was like putting on an elastic band in the morning, all over your body.

After working on the movie, have you fully taken the plunge into the comic book world?
I would definitely take another look at comic books and graphic novels because they’re insanely smart and so brilliant. It’s a whole other world that I honestly did not grow up with. I grew up very sort of girly- girl, with Barbies and such. I remember my cousin was always reading comic books at home, and I just never even thought to pick one up and check it out. Maybe Donald Duck or something like that. I understand the passion for it and the frenzy. I’m a fan of the geeks. Comic-Con has become one of my favorite places in the world. I only want to do movies that go to Comic-Con!

From USA Weekend