One hot mama

With her latest project, actor Elsa Pataky is making a strong play for husband Chris Hemsworth's longstanding title of the family's action star

- ALEXANDRA CARLTON

EIsa Pataky's voice is crackling and muffled down the phone. The Spanish native has driven her car to an area near her home in Byron Bay, where she's able to get a tiny shred of phone reception for our interview. It's no easy feat thanks to the power outages and general service disruption caused by the devastating floods and punishing rainfall around the Northern Rivers region of New South Wales earlier this year. “Hopefully it will stop soon, because I don't think people can take much more," says the model and actor, who moved to the area in 2014 with her husband, action star Chris Hemsworth, daughter India, now 10, and twin boys Sasha and Tristan, now eight. At one point, Pataky and her children were flooded in on their own with no phone reception at all. “Fingers crossed it will not be much more,” she shouts over the sound of heavy rain.

I'm talking to Pataky today, not because of the flooding crisis, but in relation to her latest project: a film with a storyline that mirrors another huge and terrifying catastrophe. Interceptor (out June 3 on Netflix) is centred on a Russian nuclear invasion - - something that wasn't anywhere near as likely a proposition when it was first conceived as it is now. It's the directorial debut for Australian thriller author Matthew Reilly and features a host of Aussie faces, including Luke Bracey, Rhys Muldoon, and Zoe Carides as the US President. Pataky plays Captain JJ Collins, whose job it is to save the United States from obliteration. So far so action movie. But here's the twist: Pataky isn't anyone's sidekick, nor anyone's love interest. She's as savage and physically brutal as any character you'd find in something starring, well, her husband for starters.