Posted: August 5, 2008, 5 a.m. EDT
Rebecca Romijn, who starred as Mystique in three “X-Men” flicks, had a close encounter with a rattlesnake recently while out hiking with her dogs near the Los Angeles home she shares with husband Jerry O’Connell.
“I was off-trail, going through the brush, and I heard ‘The Sound,’” Romijn told Self magazine. “Even if you’ve never heard it before, every fiber in your body tells you something is wrong. I looked down and froze. It was the biggest rattlesnake I had ever seen, and it was moving toward us,” she says. “I threw myself down the mountain with my dogs in a dust cloud!”
Indeed, Romijn’s dogs – and O’Connell – were the reason the actress took a hiatus from making movies in order to play transsexual Alexis Reade on ABC’s “Ugly Betty.”
“When I was working in movies, I always seemed to end up in Canada,” says Romijn, who recently announced she’s pregnant with twins. “Not that there’s anything wrong with Canada! But I didn’t want to keep going there. I wanted to be at home with my new man, and have dogs and a life.”