‘Casualty’ Newcomer Walks On as a Star

“Hi. I’ve never acted before.”

Those were the first words 22-year-old Thuy Thu Le says she blurted to director Brian DePalma at a casting call last year for the film “Casualties of War.” Le learned of the tryout--for a beautiful Vietnamese girl--from a “little tiny ad” posted in front of a Chinatown restaurant in Paris.

“I never thought of acting, even when I answered the call,” she said. “I just wanted to meet Brian DePalma. ‘The Untouchables’ is one of my favorite movies.”

So when DePalma singled her out for a part in his new film, which opens today, Le figured she had been chosen to play an extra.

“The casting director called and said, ‘You’ve got the role. You’re leaving for Thailand in four days,’ ” Le said. “Two days before I left, an agent gave me the script. I looked at it and said, ‘Wait a minute, my name appears a lot in here. Is that me?’ She said, ‘Yeah, you have the leading female role.’

“I said, ‘Oh, OK.’ ”

In “Casualties of War,” Le plays a South Vietnamese village girl who is abducted, brutally raped and eventually murdered by a squad of American soldiers on a long-range reconnaissance mission. The troop’s ranks include ringleader Sean Penn and the dissenting Michael J. Fox. In the dense jungle, Le becomes what Penn calls their “portable R&R.;”

The first-time actress, with no prior experience or training, said that she went over the script carefully with her mother before agreeing to do it.

“There were certain things I did not want to do,” Le said on a recent Los Angeles visit from her home in Paris. She paused, then dropped her eyes and continued. “I can’t take my clothes off in front of the camera. Asian people are reserved. They’re very reserved. Even after playing this role, I’m sure I will get criticism from the Asian community--’How could she play that rape victim? How could she let them throw her around?’ ”

DePalma consented to Le’s request, and a double was used for the rape scene.

“I have nothing to be ashamed of. I’m proud of doing that movie. I’m playing a victim, and it shows the whole world how a rape victim feels,” she said.

Born in Vietnam and reared in different parts of the United States, the petite Le is currently an English major at the University of Paris at Creteil. In addition to English, Le speaks Vietnamese and French. She plans to one day teach English to French students.

With her bobbed hair and Western accent, Le is far removed from the bruised and bloodied peasant girl she portrays in the film. “When I tried out for the role, I was asked to look scared and scream a lot, which is mostly what I do in the movie, anyway,” she said.

For the film, an elaborate Vietnamese village and U.S. Army base were constructed on location in Phuket, an island in the southern part of Thailand. Shooting for five months in the sweltering, tropical climate, there were times when Le wasn’t sure if she was an actress or a peasant girl.

“After a while, I felt like her. I felt like this Vietnamese girl,” Le said. “I was beaten, tied up and dragged along. Sometimes I thought, ‘Why am I doing this? Maybe I’m the victim.’ We worked 10 hours a day. I dressed like her and put on her wig. Every time I looked in the mirror, I didn’t see myself. I saw her.”

Le is a real victim of war. In 1975, when she was 8 and living in Vietnam, her father rushed into the house one night and ordered her family to pack some things.

“I asked him, ‘Where are we going?’ ” Le recalled. “He said, ‘I don’t know, we’re just leaving.’ ”

It was during the fall of Saigon. Le’s father led his family through city rubble, where bombs were falling and people were rioting in the streets. They boarded a ship and were soon on their way to the United States.

That experience came back to haunt Le during the filming of the movie.

“Sometimes--when I saw soldiers and we were in the village doing a scene--I would think about that, about the last day. That’s when it really hit me that there was a war in my country. I saw the villagers and the sets, and I thought, ‘I heard about that, but I never really knew how it was.’

“It brought me back to my Vietnamese self. I was raised in America and was sort of forgetting that I’m Vietnamese.”

For most of her scenes, Le was the only female actress on the set. Her lines were all spoken in Vietnamese, so DePalma gave her freedom to ad lib.

“I didn’t have a script. I would just go to the set concentrating, talking to myself in Vietnamese. After a while, I was able to block out all these English-speaking people and hear only Vietnamese. When I got to the set, I reacted to what was going on at that minute. I thought to myself, ‘What would I do if they were really doing this to me?’ ”

When speaking of “Casualties of War,” Le often refers to the film’s characters instead of the actors playing them. In some cases, she said it was not difficult to imagine that the scenes were actually happening. “I remember in the hooch, when they captured and kidnapped me. We did that scene three nights in a row--Meserve (Sean Penn) throwing me around, and Clark (Don Harvey) pushing me down on the table. You know, there were a lot of real bruises,” she said.

Le’s screen debut as a rape victim is convincing. DePalma was so impressed that he offered to help her find work. But she said that there are few roles for minorities and--despite her strong performance--acting is a “one-shot deal.”

“For the last two years, this is what I’ve been doing,” said Le, who recently married a medical student in Paris. “It’s been nice. But now I want to go back to the other life, become a normal person and finish my degree.”