Maria Bello's not the first actress who leaps to mind when recasting a major role in an action adventure film, but The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor director Rob Cohen had faith she could do it. Bello takes over the role Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz played in the first two Mummy movies, that of a beautiful, intelligent archaeologist in love with a handsome adventurer (played by Brendan Fraser). Weisz decided not to come back for the third Mummy movie which left the door open for another actress to take on the part of Evelyn O'Connell.

Bello was a fan of the franchise, knew the character well before committing to the role, and decided early on not to copy what Weisz had done in the first two movies. "I was in love with those first two movies," admitted Bello. "I could never fill her shoes because she was so brilliant and beautiful, and an ingénue. And this role was so different. Like Rob said, if her character was like Audrey Hepburn, my character was more like Katherine Hepburn. You know, with a 20-year-old son, in this marriage, a bit bored and staid, and needing this sort of adventure to get the passion back. So I really did find the characters really, really different. He wrote it differently and he let us explore this new relationship. It was never about, 'Oh, she did this, so you should do this.'"

Shooting guns and fighting a hardcore female Chinese soldier...all just part of a day's work on an action film set. And action newbie Bello says the experience was everything she dreamed it would be. "It was. I mean, every day I went to set I felt like a 12-year-old boy in the playground.

I really did. I loved all of the action. It was quite hard sometimes, because I was away from my son a lot. It was the longest movie I’ve ever done. We were four months in Montreal, two months in China. He came to visit me every other week or I would go home. But it was a lot of time. So I’ve basically taken the last six months off so we could kind of get back."

Bello put in her time training for the action scenes. "I trained quite a bit for [fighting the Chinese soldier] because I had to work on wires. But it was so much fun. The first time I got on wires, I felt like Peter Pan. It was quite easeful for me I think because I dreamed about doing it my whole life. [I've] talked about this before, about me wanting to be an action star since I was a little kid, reading romance novels about the woman who sneaks on the pirate ship and is a great swordsman, and she uses guns, and she fights. And so when this opportunity came up, it was a month before my 40th birthday and I finally gave up on that dream. I thought, 'I’ve gotten everything I’ve ever wanted. I’ve played great roles, worked with amazing people. But I guess I’ll never get to do my action movie.'"

Once on the set, Bello was just thrilled to be able to put her action skills to the test. "I was really excited to do all of it. The sword fight that Brendan and I do in the end in the desert, the back-to-back sword fight? We worked on that for months with a trainer. And I felt so proud of how it ended up because that was one where we had to imagine the mummies. There were six mummies coming at me, plus the mummies coming at Brendan. So we had stunt people before the scene work it out with us, so we knew exactly where those mummies would be, exactly where our eyelines were, exactly what we were doing to the mummy. And that was a bit tricky."

Even the long wait on the set in between scenes didn't faze the action movie novice. "I was actually okay with it," said Bello. "Rob has such a great energy and he sort of spreads that to everyone. And my boyfriend was there a lot, so we would play in between things. My son was there a lot so I felt like I kind of had my sort of a normalcy."

Being new to the genre, Bello's not used to a lot of CGI work and not used to needing to imagine sharing a scene with beasties and such. "Rob had such a clear vision, the art department – walls and walls of what it was actually going to look like with the CG. We knew what the Yeti was going to look like, how big they were going to be. We knew what Shangri-La was going to look like. We knew what the Himalayas were going to look like. So it was easier, because we saw what it was going to look like," explained Bello.

And speaking of the icy Himalayas, you may be fooled into believing the crew actually shot on location but Bello says it was anything but cold on the actual set. "Montreal sound stage... Imagine this - in the summer, 105 degrees. All those coats, and they didn’t make the coats thin. They were like wool coats. And every minute after the scene, after we shot a scene, we were all like [gasping] taking off our clothes, you know? I walked around in, like, a bra the whole time."

Heat and wool coats aside, Bello would love to do another Mummy movie. "I just did Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, with Robin Wright Penn and Keanu [Reeves] and Julianne Moore and Alan Arkin. Amazing experience. I play a housewife in the ‘60s and ‘70s who is manic-depressive on Dexedrine. So I got to do my ranting, and I got my dramatic fill. But I would love to continue to do more of these movies. I could never give up the drama, and the sort of the more intense stuff. But this would be my dream, to do both."

"It’s a very different franchise now, I think, with how Rob Cohen did it," added Bello. "It’s so big, there’s so much more action. And depending how the movie does, I think Universal will want one right away, which I’m hoping."