When Actress Deborah Unger ‘Whispers,’ Star-Makers Listen

Canadian actress Deborah Unger’s first part in an American movie is just a supporting role, but it’s the kind of smoldering, nuanced turn that sometimes makes even the local jaded star-makers sit up.

In the new thriller “Whispers in the Dark,” she plays a therapy patient, with a mesmerizing acting-out of an S&M; sex-fantasy scene. It’s arguably the most disturbing Hollywood commingling of sex and violence since Sharon Stone crossed her legs in “Basic Instinct.”

“Eve (her character) is not a healthy woman,” Unger says. “Every time I went to say those words (in the scene), I felt very depressed, I got very angry and felt humiliated.”

Eventually, though, she incorporated those feelings into the scene, in which Eve tells her female therapist (Annabella Sciorra) that she wants to strip and masturbate. “If the equation had ever become sadomas-

ochistic fantasy equals pleasure, I couldn’t have done it,” Unger says.

“The fact that it equals pain, you’re underlining how destructive these forces can be. That made it exciting to do. I could understand where this woman could go once I let that in.”

Her first time acting was humiliating, too, says Unger, albeit in an innocent way. A bookish girl in grade school, she was assigned to help a fellow student learn his lines in the school play, “A Christmas Carol.” But the little boy, who was cast as Scrooge, “got scared and he got sick on me,” Unger says, and at the last minute she was drafted to go on stage. “There I was in a beard. . . . I was so scared. I had no intention of doing that again.” Connoisseurs of kinky film scenes probably will agree that it’s good she changed her mind.