Nikita ready for action

Some girls float into a room like a silk lace hanky caught in the swirl of a summer breeze.

Peta Wilson, the Aussie athlete chosen as TV's new Nikita, swaggers in like a pistol-whippin' cowboy.

"Hey, mate," she calls out to a passing grip guy on the Toronto soundstage, "Do you know what we call a cute guy back home?"

He warily shakes his head.

"We say: `What a spunky guy!'" she roars, slapping her knee.

At 26, the oddly beautiful newcomer with white-blond hair, ice-blue eyes, and a petulant pout, runneths over with her own home-grown brand of Down Under spunk.

Starring in the new CTV action/drama series based on the successful French film La Femme Nikita (and the U.S. version, Point Of No Return), Wilson's spent the last four months crawling, leaping and chasing after bad guys in her kick-ass stiletto boots as the reluctant femme fatale spy.

"She's a victim of circumstances," Wilson says of her character, a street kid wrongly accused of murder and shuffled into the world of espionage for a clandestine government organization.

"But she does what needs to be done to survive. A lot of people will identify with her in that way."

Wilson knows of what she speaks.

Preparing for her Nikita audition, the well-schooled actress, who was getting "sick of sitting on my butt, taking a number, then losing parts to big names," created a thick file of biographical notes on the character in her quest for the job.

What endeared studio execs, though, was how she strutted into USA Network offices with appropriate bad-girl attitude.

"I picked up this NBA-sized basketball and started bouncing it against the walls," she recalls.

Wilson's army brat childhood and teenaged athletics was par for the obstacle course on which her very physical character embarks.

As a champion sailor, and netball player once voted Most Valuable Player in her hometown of Sydney, Australia, she was reared in an overachieving family who encouraged morning laps in the pool and afternoon Judo throws.

"I was always taught to do my best" says the actress, a self-confessed rebel in her Catholic schoolgirl days, "and then to do better."

During a rigorous eight-week, pre-shoot training sked with an airborne ranger, Wilson learned Tai-Chi, breaking and entering techniques, and a sturdy right hook.

"If anyone grabs me, I can really hurt them," she warns.

Bruised and bounced around during her first Nikita months when she insisted on performing many of her own stunts, the actress slowed down after one mishap left her with a concussion.

"I felt really dizzy and sick," she says, after ramming her head against a tree, "but I'm not any more of a lunatic than I was before."

Getting more than her hands dirty doing hands-on street research, Wilson huddled in downtown Toronto squats with homeless kids to get a sense of Nikita's rootlessness.

"A lot of acting is observation," she says. "The world has such a weird, wrong perception of the kids that fill the streets."

Squatting in Regent Park is worlds away from the European catwalks where the 5'10" former model strutted her skinny self a few years ago.

She was sent by her mom ("She thought I was too tomboyish") to learn feminine ways and wiles at the same agency that spawned uber-models Elle Macpherson and Rachel (Mrs. Rod Stewart) Hunter. "I never made it to supermodel status because I just wanted to have a good time," says Wilson. "I'd make money and spend it on my friends and family."

Growing tired of "being judged by how I look," and growing thin from bouts of anorexia and bulimia, Wilson hung up her portfolio. "I didn't want to be a `pretty girl' any more."

Packing up and moving to L.A. six years ago, Wilson wiped off her war paint to study acting with a vengeance.

"I was really controlling in drama class. My teacher would say to me, `Pete, one day you'll direct. But for now, your job is to act!'"

With virtually little acting experience save some small parts in B-movies, Wilson began her Nikita shoot last October "nervous and apologetic," she admits, before rising to the occasion.

"She's outspoken, she's strong, and she has a direct energy that drives everyone around her," says director George Bloomfield. "She doesn't suffer fools gladly."

While her Nikita role calls for a quota of lipstick and lash fluttering in the Charlie's Angels mode of seductive sleuthing ("A woman in a sexy dress will always get her man," Wilson says), the actress, nicknamed "Jane Bond-age" by some TV critics, tries to veer away from that image.

For one teary scene, "She went off set and cried so her eyes would be all puffy and red," says Bloomfield. "She's not afraid of looking bad."

At the end of her 17-hour crime-fighting days, Wilson goes home to the comforts of her rented mid-town loft (where Hugh Grant and Liz Hurley stayed last year), and roams our streets and cafes, observing the natives.

"I love Canada," she sighs. "People here are up front and honest ... that's very Australian."

To keep her energy up for her gun-toting heroics, she can often be found on set curled up in the corner meditating or "flirting with the crew," she laughs.

Today, she is on the floor on all fours in sweatpants, giving the director 20 push-ups before a scene where she's to rappel from the ceiling.

"I have to find a way to survive," jokes the actress, out of breath, "without all this killing me."

THE PETA WILSON FILE

ON HER NAME: "I hated my name as a kid," says Wilson, whose nickname at home is `Pete.' "I would change my name every few weeks to more girly names. If the family called me Peta, I wouldn't answer."

ON MODELLING: "It's so bad for girls," she says. "It ends up giving nice, young, pretty girls a feeling of self-loathing."

ON WHAT GIVES HER `THE WILLIES': "Guns. I won't have one in my home in L.A. Hopefully people who watch the show will take (the violence) as entertainment and not reality."