When dinosaurs came to Téa

Apart from the unhappy reminders of her own life, Leoni could also have done without the dangerous underwater scenes in the movie.

"I did make a call early on to Steven Spielberg's office. I said, 'Please don't kill me in this one because I know you're not sure about the ending and I want to be in Jurassic Park 4, but please can we be in the desert with no water?'"

Although she has the physical attributes of a potential Olympic swimmer, Leoni admits that her ambition since childhood until "only a few years ago" was to work in a toll booth.

"As far as I understood it, you got to sit on a chair in a warm, cosy booth listening to music and having people hand you money every 10 seconds. How could you not win?"

Famous for being fastidiously dressed in blouses and pearls, Leoni is best-liked for being ballsy, funny and entirely irreverent. And clearly she has little sense of her own self-importance and didn't know her star sign until she moved to Los Angeles.

"I think my grandmother might have given me a birthstone or something once but that was it. I'm from New York. We don't do that shit."

Leoni's bright - she studied psychology and anthropology at university - which is no surprise given that Duchovny is famously erudite and sharp-witted. Most refreshing of all, she is clear on her own priorities - family first, career a distant second. But then she cannot imagine a better environment in which to be a working

mother: "You say you're going to bring your kid to work and everyone lights up. You get a great trailer you can string up toys in, and you get to run out, do a scene, run back and pop a boob in."

BETWEEN takes on Jurassic Park 3, her daughter West spent time chasing peacocks in Hawaii and hanging out alongside her mother in the make-up trailer. "She'd have her own blood, scabs and scars just like mine for the film. The funniest day was when we were filming at Universal Studios and there we were, walking along, blood dripping down the both of us. Right at that moment, the tour train came by and I realised, 'Oh my God, what are these people going to think? There's Téa Leoni having just beaten her child!' The other funny thing was when I fell down on the tennis court the other day and got quite a good scrape on my knee and she just looked at me and said, 'Well wipe it off.'"

Ask Leoni if there's a summer box office rivalry between her and Duchovny (who also battles large animatronic species in Evolution), and she looks at you as if you're bonkers.

"We're not competing. Are you kidding! We're in the same bed. This takes 'what's good for the goose is good for the gander' to a whole new level. It's not competitive, it's 'Oh my God, we rock!'"

Their respective big-screen experiences did, though, have them marvelling at the very ridiculousness of it all. One night, Leoni came home from work and undressed to get into bed.

"David looked up from his book and said, 'At what point in this film do they whip you?' I had slash marks all over my back from this dino claw, which I wore proudly, I have to say. So our lovemaking was a little odd at times due to bruises and slashes."

Leoni has no qualms either about the cinema-going world seeing her husband's bottom in Evolution.

"Because I think he has such a good ass, I'm willing to share it, I really am. If it was a bad ass I'd be the first to pull him aside and say, 'Baby, don't do that any more'. We did some ass-painting not so long ago, for an animal-rights charity. I loaded up his ass with paint - I think loaded seems the wrong visual here. I packed the paint around the area and then he would sort of spank himself with the canvas. He fetched quite a good sum for it too and it was a great Saturday night. So we may not go out to parties and premieres, but we've got our own sense of fun."