Hurley plays a variation of the Diana Rigg empowered-female-in-a-catsuit role made famous in The Avengers in the 1960s. Suffice it to say, the movie is silly.
"I can be quite silly," Hurley agrees happily, "and, being English, I laugh at anything to do with lavatories or bottoms, which is very mindless. I like silly. Mike makes me laugh a lot in this, but he makes me laugh a lot in real life."
Which brings us to her one major annoyance with Austin Powers. Her favorite scene, set in a lavatory of course, denies her access. It's in a men's washroom and the key performers are Myers, and Tom Arnold in a cameo as a big-talkin' Texan who, in his own cubicle, urges Myers to indulge him with "a courtesy flush" while he's hearing loud noises from the adjoining cubicle.
"I'm really angry I'm not in it," Hurley contends, not convincingly because she's laughing about it.
Polite society be damned, in Hurley's world. When she's asked if she found Myers' chest of fake hair sexy, or even funny, she screws up that beautiful model's visage into a troll's face and spits out: "I wanted to vomit! I'm not that into hair. He was like a yak!"
The absurd Carnaby Street '60s clothes, however, were a sartorial hoot, she contends. "I love it," Hurley says of the bright colors and extreme cuts of the era. "I think it's really cool. It's always coming in and out (of fashion) in retro looks. That's what all the young guys are wearing now."
Her own fave in the film is her Riggish catsuit. "I quite like the catsuit, I suppose, although it's very uncomfortable. I couldn't bend in it, but I looked quite cool."
Not so cool were photographs published in the French magazine Paris Match recently showing a topless Hurley sunning herself poolside at her Los Angeles home. An unidentified young man, not Hugh Grant, was applying lotion to her backside. Billed as `Hurley's Revenge' for Grant's tasteless act, the photographs were published after the interview, so Hurley could not be cornered on the subject.
Yet the incident is more fuel for the paparazzi parade into her life and Grant's life. The media interest has been so intense for the past two years the couple feel they cannot move back to England.
So Hurley admits they still have no real place to call their own: "I don't really have a home, sadly. I just have a third suitcase and haul it around," she laments. "I just go to where I'm paid to be."
