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 Maria Bello  Bello at the New York premiere of "World Trade Center"
For Bello, this is another super performance on a resumé that keeps getting better and better. Add this to her critically-acclaimed turns in "The Cooler" (the picture that really made people take notice), "Assault on Precinct 13," and "A History of Violence" (for which she deserved Oscar consideration), and she has become one of the top leading ladies in Hollywood, an A-list star.
I was a Maria Bello fan dating back to her short-lived 1996 TV series "Mr. and Mrs. Smith," and believed she had star power. But I remember thinking she was making a big mistake when she left a secure role on "ER" to take a shot at being a movie star. I'm glad she proved me wrong.
Q: Do you have any specific memory of the Twin Towers?
Maria Bello: I lived in New York City for seven years, before moving to L.A., to Venice Beach, about ten years ago. I lived in the West Village and I would run, a few times a week, down the path on the West Side Highway, all the way down to the World Trade Center. So that was my picture of them...and suddenly they were gone. I was in New York that morning, staying at a hotel on the upper West Side. I was on the street getting a pack of cigarettes at a newsstand. And everything was so quiet. And a woman turned to me and said, "I haven't smoked in eleven years, but do you have a cigarette?" I asked, "Why?" And she said, "A plane just went through the World Trade Center. When I got upstairs, my mother and I saw the second plane go through. We couldn't believe it.
Q: I've read that you went to St. Vincent's Hospital with your mother, who is a nurse.
MB: My personality is such that I said, "We've got to do something!" They called for doctors and nurses to go downtown, so we took an ambulance to St. Vincent's. My mom, who is a nurse, stayed there the whole day. I stayed for a couple of hours waiting for people to come in and no one came in except for firefighters for smoke inhalation and small cuts and bruises. Then I left because I had a six-month's-old baby back at the hotel. They were talking about other bombs going off and anthrax, and I had this mother-lioness-protector feeling come over me and went back to be with my baby.
I walked up Sixth Avenue in a sea of people covered in gray dust and saw the most astounding moments between individuals you'd never think would be together. I remember seeing a homeless man in a pink tutu holding up a man in a business suit who was crying and bleeding. I think that's what that day represented, when the whole world came together to support us.
Q: Did that experience influence you in regard to the movie?
MB: It did, because I walked away not only with the tragedy of that day but also the intense "humanity" that I felt when so many human beings came together. It was very big in my heart. Q: What was your reaction when you were first offered a film with this subject matter?
MB: Oh!!!! I read the script by Andrea Berloff and was so incredibly moved by it that I was just bawling at the end. And I said I had to do it. I met Oliver Stone and he offered me the role right then, in the room we were in. I stood up and hugged him so hard, and went, "I have to do this movie, thank you so much, I'm dying to act for you!"
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