Thandie keeps it impossibly clean

When I asked director John Woo how he saw my character, Nyah Hall, an international thief who's got the hearts of rivals special agent Ethan Hunt, played by Tom Cruise, and his former fellow agent Ambrose, played by Dougray Scott, he replied cryptically, "She's a butterfly."

Initially I thought she might just be window-dressing, a bit of fluff - but she wasn't. Nyah's enlisted by Hunt to ferret out vital information on Ambrose, her former squeeze. She's clever and stuntwise she had to be every bit as physical as the boys.

She also has a sexy bath scene with Tom Cruise - as she steals a necklace while basically squatting on his chest with her breasts in his face. It was hilarious. The last time we did anything like that was when he nibbled my jugular in Interview With The Vampire.

The film has some amazing stunts. It very stylishly tells the story of special agent Hunt on an impossible mission across Australia to stop the villainous ex-agent Ambrose before he can cause biological terror with a deadly virus. Ving Rhames plays a computer buff on Special Agent Hunt's side and Anthony Hopkins is his boss.

We were all huge fans of the Mission: Impossible TV series - bringing it into the 21st century and setting it in Australia brought a new spin to the story. It was great for me that we shot mainly in Australia because that's where I made my first film, Flirting, with Tom's wife Nicole Kidman who was working there, at the same time, on Baz Luhrmann's Moulin Rouge. a