beyond that blonde girl

Public Mag - Volume 04, Summer, 2006

The first thing one notices when chatting with Sarah Carter is that she’s tough, real tough, and she’s not going to suffer fools gladly, madly, or otherwise. So woe behold the hapless questioner who doesn’t have his act together, or his tape deck.

Such was the case when our wires collided earlier this summer, she in L.A., me in sunny Miami. All I knew about the fair young lass was that she’d been in Numb3rs and Smallville and Final Destination 2, where she was wiped off the face of the film in the first four minutes.

Fortunately for me Sarah Carter’s also got a wicked cool sense of humor (witness her domain name: thatblondegirl.net), so she chalked my apparent ineptitude up to some wisecrack in the sky; and, fortunately for us all, she’s more than some mere bit part blonde. Bit parts are but where she began.
So we begin at the beginning…sort of.

In addition to the abovementioned D.A. turn in Numb3rs (Rob Morrow’s “great”), her teleporting obsessive Fatal Attracter in Smallville (in real life “I couldn’t be bothered”), and her early unceremonious cadavering in Final Destinaion 2 (“it didn’t feel like four minutes; we shot that scene for weeks”), the Manitoba-born Carter’s “lived through” the whole of Wishmaster 3, toured Sundance with the Entourage, tackled a Twilight Zone here, a Boston Legal there, and classed-up the duly gone WB’s duly-drubbed Black Sash.

But bits get better and Sarah is set to show the whole world she’s well beyond the standard bombshell.

Okay, so first dear Sarah had to survive a strenuous South Beaching alongside Paris Hilton for National Lampoon’s not too much anticipated Pledge This! No one can fault her the fun-filled payday (“we lived in The Shore Club for four months”), nor the chance at hoopla. There are a million ways why This! isn’t beyond the pale, not least of which will be its profile. And, anyway, sometimes even the most beyond gal has gotta smirk one for the team.

Better, and beyond even the starriest expectations, will be a threesome: DOA: Dead or Alive, directed by Cory Yuen, the very cat who martial-artsed both Transporter movies; Skinwalkers from James Isaac, the long-term scary man for the very scary David Cronenberg; and – are you ready for this? – Shark, Spike Lee’s primetime CBS offering (really) that stars everyone’s favorite omnivore, James Woods (double really). She’ll be in them all, and odds are she’ll be in them to win them.

Three chances of a keen young lifetime. All that, then some and more. We’re betting that before soon Sarah Carter will be that blonde bit girl no more.