Tamara Gorski attracts very interesting men. Her most famous romance was with the Greek god Hercules, and now brooding vampire Angel is intrigued by her. "I would have to say that they're both surreal," laughs the actress when asked which one she'd prefer to date. "Hercules is not of this time, and neither is Angel, but they're equally cool in their own respective ways!"

A Canadian-born actress who went to Los Angeles for an audition two years ago and never made her way back to Toronto, Gorski has a resume packed with genre roles - Poltergeist: The Legacy, Psi Factor, Earth: Final Conflict, Highlander, Dracula: The Series, to name a few. "I've had the really great good fortune to get these chameleon-like roles - I haven't been stereotyped," she rejoices. "Though in the last three shows, I played the girlfriend the guy has never had. With Derek Rayne in Poltergeist, he hadn't let anyone get close, and Hercules had his wife killed so he was afraid to get involved. Angel is standoffish because he's become so protective of his secrets. We're always dealing with these intimacy issues."

Guardian Angel

Gorski's character Rebecca has gotten closer to Angel than any woman yet to appear on the series. "I play a popular actress he helps out because she has a stalker, though at first he doesn't want to," she explains. "Wesley says Angel must feel something for her, otherwise he would have taken the case right away, and Cordy is upset with Angel for not taking the case because she wants to get close to a star!"

The reclusive actress and the reclusive vampire bond "in a very keen but nerd-like way," since they both avoid sunlight and are both obsessive about their privacy. In fact, Rebecca's initial attraction to Angel seems to be that he has no idea who she is, though she has thousands of fans who know her as "Raven" from a popular, recently cancelled television series.

"We shot a premiere at an old theater, the Pacific Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, with the carpets and the lights, and all the fans are screaming, 'Raven!'" explains Gorski. "Angel ends up staying over and protecting me one night - the stalker comes crashing through the front window at this beautiful house in the Palisades." Because she can't see his reflection in her mirror, she deduces that he's a vampire.

Rebecca drugs Angel in the hope that he will turn her into an immortal, but she doesn't seem to have thought about the nasty side of blood-drinking demonic life. The drug causes evil Angelus to emerge, so that Rebecca must defend herself from him and flee. This might sound like bad news, but it leaves open the possibility for the character to return. "Most people die on the show," notes Gorski. "The producers were already starting to toss around ideas in the middle of this blood-drinking scene as to what they might do to bring Rebecca back, so that was a really great treat in the middle of a 14-hour day."

"I don't know if fans believe this, but the show's producers do read the boards and the mail, so if anyone liked my character on Angel - or Now and Again or Hercules/Xena - they can ask the producers to bring me back!" she adds hopefully.

Getting Her Irish Up

The role of Morrigan was also supposed to be limited, but the producers asked Gorski to stay after seeing her work. "It was only supposed to be a three-show thing, like when Lucy Lawless came to Hercules - it was just supposed to be the Celtic stuff," reveals the actress, who thinks Rob Tapert must have been impressed with her bedraggled performance on her second day of work.

"For my first swordfight, I'd had 20 minutes to practice two fights - one with three guys and one with six guys. We were on one of those beautiful black beaches like in The Piano, the sun was setting, the ocean was coming in, it was raining, we were climbing on rocks in new boots, they were pushing into overtime and the camera was on sticks in the sand. Of course, they'd made the swords for for men of Kevin's height - I'm a foot shorter than he is! They gave me this heavy broadsword for what was supposed to be a one-handed fight, and we did it in two takes. The next day, Rob Tapert came in and said, 'Do you want to stay on a little longer?'"

Gorski did, returning for three shows after the initial Irish arc, then another two. Midway through shooting, she was cast on Poltergeist: The Legacy, requiring her to commute from Vancouver through Hollywood to New Zealand and back for several months. "I spent a lot of time in the silver bird," she jokes, but says she'd do it again because it was so enjoyable. She particularly enjoyed filming "For Those of You Just Joining Us," a contemporary parody in which Hercules tries to help the show's writing staff generate ideas. "It was excellent - everybody in the cast was in that one. Having Bruce Campbell direct was the most fun in the whole world."

Campbell impressed Gorski as a director "because he is so specifically organized - it's beyond being 'prepared.' When they were shooting the fireside scenes in 'For Those of You Just Joining Us,' he'd shoot all the takes he needed in one direction, keeping the cameras rolling instead of stopping and resetting. I can't think of a more appropriate person to have directing me with a bloody cleaver than Bruce."

"Plus it was a kick to see Bruce play Rob - his old buddy and tormentor from the Evil Dead days," she adds. "He went all out, dying his hair and arm hair red to do the part! The whole production comes from a group of buddies from Detroit, Rob and Sam Raimi and Bruce all grew up making Super-8 films in high school, so they are this massive production clique who have grown up to make just more of what they've always been making."

And Kevin Sorbo? "Kevin and I tethered our leathers together. I had this jacket on that said 'Sheriff,' and I'd call him 'Coach,'" she explains. "He taught me a lot about that genre. I'd come from stage and period pieces, and got thrown into this high-turnaround syndicated television show that moves really fast."

Because she arrived for the third show of the season, "when everybody gets back into it," they were up and running "and he was already buff." In Morrigan's early appearances, she and Hercules were adversaries, and she got to kick his butt. But after he helped save her daughter Brigid from malevolent god Kernunnos, Hercules and Morrigan fell in love while helping the Celts rebuild and the Druids reassemble. They shared a romantic idyll in Cyprus before prophecies about their separate destinies pulled them apart.

Between episodes, Gorski took some karate classes, so when she did one karate-style fight, she decided to try some new moves - which didn't always work out. "As two guys came into my circle, I threw one over a table of fish and grabbed the other guy a little off, tossed him over another table of goodies and still took on two more gents by the wrists, spinning them around and whacking them into each other. As soon as the take was done, I lifted up my right hand - my thumb had gone all the way back from catching the fish table guy in the underarm wrong, and the pain was fierce. All in the name of the demi-god show."

Gorski dyed her hair red for Hercules "and we would be still laughing about it months later because it's really tough 'to get the red out.'" Shooting the series was "like being at camp" for her: "We got to play outside every day. The light is really exceptional there, the sunsets and sunrises make the clouds pink like cotton candy, so that was a plus to the 4:40 AM calls. I had to take extra care to get shade and water because I was getting sunstroke, losing sense of direction and whatnot.

Along with most of the regulars - "Kevin and Bruce and Rob and Lucy" - Gorski attended a New Zealand production of Twelve Angry Men to see Stuart Devenie, who played Morrigan's former lover Kernunnos. Though she didn't get to act much with Michael Hurst since the writers had temporarily killed off Iolaus, Gorski was directed by Hercules' regular co-star. "He really helped me with my whole philosophy of film, and with maintaining stage work. Like me, he was directing and writing his own film, so we talked about that."

Accents and Artistry

Gorski, who makes independent films when she's not performing, spent some of her time in New Zealand shooting an experimental movie. Her short film Space, "a meditation by six different girlfriends of the same guy about the responses they wish they'd given when he said, 'I need a little space,'" aired at the Toronto Worldwide Short Film Festival and sold to the Women's Television Network.

Known in the industry for her skill with accents - she did voice-overs for Oksana Baiul for the skater's Olympic-year profile - Gorski was coached on Hercules by Irish musician Conor McSweeney, whom she adored. "He's one of the best vocal performers I've ever seen," she says. "I owe all of the fun and the music of the accent to him. He would put each scene on tape for me, and he would be in ADR with me so that if I needed to hear how he would say a line, he could say it for me."

Proud of her work in the World War II film The Web of War and the play Little Sister, in which she played a young woman struggling with anorexia nervosa and self-esteem issues, Gorski nonetheless cites Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris as her favorite job. "I played a Dior model in this Angela Lansbury movie of the week. I acted with Lothaire Bluteau, who is a really fantastic Canadian actor. He was in Orlando with Tilda Swinton. I'd seen him onstage in London during an art history trip in college, then a year later he had to play my paramour! We're shooting in Paris, I'm trying on clothes with the costumier and being fitted for Dior fashions kind of like Audrey Hepburn in Funny Face, meeting Angela and Lothaire. Then we shot some of it in Hungary with Diana Rigg, and I really love her, too!"

Gorski describes "long, three-hour dinners" hosted by Omar Sharif, who would debate philosophy with Rigg while the rest of the crew went around the table exchanging stories. While in Paris, she also learned to drive standard, "so I could do a scene driving a 1956 car with the gear shifts...no pressure at all!" Beside her in the car was Lansbury, singing songs from Sweeney Todd to pass the time between shots. "This production involved 'her boys' - her husband was her manager, her son was the producer and her other son was the director. It was really great to be working with her. Not to mention the great fashions we got to wear."

She also enjoyed working with Oscar winner Michael Lerner on a Norman Jewison series, The Painted Word, in which prominent directors took famous paintings and created stories around them. Gorski's was based on a Degas, "The Rehearsal," featuring a circular staircase with "ballerina slippers and a tutu coming down the stairs." Gorski played a talented ballerina who had to convince the maestro to let her boyfriend play violin for the ballet by using his seduction attempt to bring the boyfriend to his attention. "She totally uses her feminine wiles to get the maestro to come to her apartment, but as he's leaving he hears her boyfriend play, and it all comes together. We had such a good time."

Taming The Artistic Devil

The Winnipeg native says she never specifically wanted to become an actress, though she'd been performing since the age of four. The daughter of a doctor, she was pegged to follow her father to medical school, but took a year off to "tame the artistic devil" and never went back. "I dropped out of med school to join the circus!" she jokes. "My weekly schedule included performance and art, so I'd get out of school and study piano, voice, jazz, ballet, character, choir, music theory. I was onstage dancing, singing, and acting throughout the calendar year."

Because there are artists and master craftsmen on both sides of Gorski's family, no one thought it unusual when she applied for art school, where she studied painting and art history. "I'm wild about Dada and surrealism, anything from Miro to Duchamp." During her studies, Gorski realized she needed to work in a field which enabled her to express her ideas through an artistic medium.

"I started choreography at the age of 13. I wrote and directed my first play in high school, it was called Dada Hamlet of Love, it was all the famous quotations from Hamlet reorganized for four female players. They speak Shakespearean dialogue directly from the text, but they're basically kvetching about men. I produced an independent CD a couple of years ago with my cousin, and I also get up at open mike nights and I sing - I just recorded some country songs. I'm working on setting up a documentary of a Canadian filmmaker, and I'm working on my second film, and my second album, and if the acting powers that be will send me something to play with, I don't know what I'll be doing!"

"It's been a wild two and a half years," admits the actress, stopping to assess for a moment the great volume of work she's already produced. "I still have things in storage all over the place, Toronto and Hollywood, I'm finally gathering everything in New York." Her two episodes of Chronicles of the Paranormal have aired on the Learning Channel.

Her next film will be Haven, a World War II-era show about the woman who transported the first 1,000 Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe to New York. It stars Natasha Richardson, Alan Arkin, Anne Bancroft, and Amanda Plummer. "I'm going to be playing opposite all of them as Anna, one of the core group Natasha's character befriends, and who she keeps a special watch over - my paramour will be Henry Czerny."

How does Gorski decide which scripts to pursue? "I look for something in the writing, in the dialogue - usually it's a line or two, not in the character description but in the script," she explains. "There have been a lot of things that commercially would have made a lot of sense, career-wise, for me to do - for example there was a contract sitting on my desk for a big Hollywood movie - but I was onstage in a show called Serpent Kills at the time, and I didn't want to leave. I've always just followed the lead, or the people involved. Angel was insane, we had 12-14 hour days, but the director was very creative - he was fantastic."

"Acting has given me the chance to be a ballerina from 1920 or a Dior model from 1957 or the new girl in Kids in the Hall or a half-god, half-human or somebody who has an encounter with a vampire!" concludes Gorski. "What could be more fun?"