HEWITT KICKS IT IN 'TUXEDO'

"I was in a cast for two weeks," Hewitt said in an interview. "I hurt my ankle kicking a guy in the head. Kicking Ritchie [Coster, who plays the villain,] in the head, actually. ... So I couldn't do a lot of running around at that point, and we had to very quickly sort of come up with a way around it."

In the film, a megalomaniacal water tycoon plans to poison the world's water supply using bacteria-infected insects. During the film's climactic fight scene, Hewitt's secret-agent character is rendered immobile when the queen insect becomes trapped in a cup on her face. "Jackie came up with the fact that it lands on my nose, which makes me unable to move at that point. So I just kind of have to turn back and forth," she said.

Chan said in an interview that he designed the scene specifically to focus the audience's attention on Hewitt's predicament. "She don't have to do nothing," he said. "Because she already cracked her ankle, she cannot move anymore. So that's why I come up with the idea [to] use the cup. She [was] just standing there. I do the action sequence. And also, at that moment, no matter how good I am, the audience, they won't concentrate on me. They will concentrate on her."

For the rest of the film's choreographed fight scenes, Hewitt said that Chan worked around her strengths as much as her weaknesses. "Jackie, every single day, would be like, 'Hey, throw a kick.' Or, 'Hey, box with my hand,' or whatever," she said. "And I could never really figure out what he was doing. Finally, what I realized is, by the time we got to the action sequences, what he'd done the whole movie while we were shooting dialogue and stuff ... is find out what I did best and what I was best at. And he incorporated that into all of the fight scenes. I was a really strong person at kicking, so I kick a lot in the movie. ... He kind of took everything that we had sort of play practiced, without me knowing during the movie, and incorporated it in my scenes."

The Tuxedo opens September 27, 2002.