WONDERS DOWN UNDER
Craggy-faced actor Lance Henriksen doesn't do happy. He specializes in villains, misfits (The Terminator), even androids (Aliens and Alien 3). "I don't think of myself as a bad guy," says Henriksen, 54. "I think of myself as a guy with problems." He had plenty of those filming the thriller No Escape in a remote rain forest in northern Queensland, Australia. "Every day, we drove an hour and a half over dirt roads to get to the rain forest," says Henriksen, who spent nearly three months on location with costar Ray Liotta. "There were giant pythons lying across the road. We would stop and pull them off so we wouldn't kill them. The mud was so thick it would suck the shoes right off your feet." Life wasn't much easier off the set. "We were all so spread out, slaying at different houses, that to get together meant shlepping across endless prairies. It was worse than L.A."

THE CLEAN-SLATE CLUB
Lara Flynn Boyle can't imagine having one roommate, let alone two, as she does in the campus comedy Threesome. "I don't think I could handle it. I'm an only child, so I'm very particular about my things," says Boyle, 24. "I'm a neat freak. I'm always walking around with a Windex bottle and a paper towel, cleaning everything." Boyle can't break the habit, even as a guest in hotels. Now in Morocco shooting a TNT movie based on the biblical story of Jacob, she loves returning to a newly scrubbed room. "But when I'm nervous, I'll clean more than the maids do," she says. "It's bizarre, but very therapeutic."

THAT'S CHEW BIZ
Madeleine Stowe grew up in Los Angeles playing cowboys and Indians, but her version of the game didn't prepare her for playing a gun-toting prostitute in the new western Bad Girls. "My friends played the cowboys and Indians," says Stowe, 35. "I was always the horse, named Germaine Monteil after the cosmetics company. My mother had that perfume bottle on her dresser, and I remember thinking, 'What a neat name for a horse.' " One habit she picked up filming Bad Girls wasn't so neat. "I had to learn to chew tobacco," says Stowe. "Now I'm really good at it, although my husband [Dream On's Brian Benben] thinks it's gross. I still practice my chewing techniques in the car. I can spit at high speeds without hitting the car next to me."

HONOR ROLE
Hanging out at Harvard for three weeks to play an ambitious Ivy League student in the new movie With Honors earned high marks with actress Moira Kelly (The Cutting Edge). "I went to lots of parties. I didn't go to class much. I wanted to act like a real student," jokes Kelly, 26. Even so, she received a degree. "When we filmed the graduation scene, we got real diplomas," says Kelly, a Marymount Manhattan College alumnus. "I was really excited until I saw that mine had my character's name on it. It would be so cool if my parents could hang a real Harvard diploma in the living room and tell people, 'Moira graduated from Harvard—just a little thing she did on the side.' "