Make It Martinis, Bikinis and Meanies

‘I hear the silents are coming back. At least I’m hoping,” jokes Sam Phillips, the sing er-cum-actress who goes against type in all sorts of ways to play a deadly mute in the new “Die Hard” sequel, “Die Hard With a Vengeance.”

While other members of the action blowout’s cast were working out and bulking up with a vengeance, Phillips could be glad that, for her speechless part, she’d already spent years toning her ocular muscles.

Doing a substantial role with no lines in her very first movie was “easy in the sense that when I sing, I’m always trying to connect with people and I use my eyes a lot,” she says, “and I ended up just using my eyes most of the time in this.”

(In fact, the critically acclaimed alternative-pop thrush is somewhat legendary for coming out on stage and, during the opening instrumental bars of her first song, slowly and methodically staring down each section of the audience.)

Of course, here Phillips is way too evil to just spend the movie applying the evil eye. As the decidedly fatal femme fatale and moll to Jeremy Irons’ lead terrorist, she inflicts serious bodily damage with knife and pistol as well as peepers. From “The Indescribable Wow” (her first Virgin album) to the indescribable ouch, she’s come.

For a singer-songwriter renowned for dealing with high-minded moral and spiritual concerns, you might think this bloody play-acting could pose a conflict of image, if not interest, but no.

“It sounded like a fun experience,” says Phillips--”especially when they said I didn’t have to do a German accent, I thought, ‘Oh, even more fun.’ Get to wear a big scar and maim and kill. Actually, it sounded more like Gestalt therapy than it did like acting. It was sort of therapeutic, in a way, because this guard whose throat I had to slit looked a lot like Rush Limbaugh, so that was my motivation in that scene.”

Phillips, 32, was “discovered” for the movies when director John McTiernan got a gander of the cover of her 1994 album, “Martinis and Bikinis,” and simply liked her icy look: “John seemed to think I had a mean streak down the middle of my face or something,” she figures.

In fact, in everyday life, Phillips’ face has a pallor that tends toward tender, not nasty, which did cause some consternation when Sam initially didn’t seem quite . . . terroristic enough. “He [McTiernan] wanted me to be like the lady in ‘From Russia With Love,’ Lotte Lenya. Man, that’s really asking a lot of me. He kept saying, ‘More makeup! More mascara! Where are those eyelashes? She looks too sweet!’ ”

“He wanted the eyelashes to stick out through the shades,” adds Phillips’ husband and producer, T Bone Burnett.

The singer arrived on the set prepared mainly to slice, dice and shoot. A bedroom scene with Irons was an unscripted addition sprung at the last minute, much to Phillips’ nervous consternation. Besides a black bra, the production provided her a blouse with instant-pop-off buttons.

“I had thought, ‘This is such a boy movie, there’s no way there’s gonna be any mushy stuff.’ But I like the way it ended up, where I get to shoot at the helicopter--like the whole point of the love scene is so that we can get interrupted so that I can shoot at Bruce Willis. What a great way to do a love scene, I say.”

Coincidentally, Phillips had taken some acting classes before the unexpected “Die Hard” casting call because she was considering auditioning down the road for a musical about 1920s evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson that a friend, the noted songwriter and orchestrator Van Dyke Parks, was writing.

A nother album is probably up next for the singer whose last one got her voted “best songwriter” in the most recent Rolling Stone critics’ poll. Phillips would like to do another film--if only, she says, to be allowed an on-screen utterance or three.

Mightn’t some of the fans think she’s selling out by going Hollywood in such a big way here?

“I just think it’s a funny thing to do. It might be different if I was singing a Whitney Houston kind of song at the end. . . . I think the fans I’ve met are mostly people with a sense of humor, or they don’t usually end up buying my records. So I don’t think they’ll be too offended.”

One audience that could take some offense is the crowd that followed her in the early ‘80s when, before adopting the name of Sam, she was known as Leslie Phillips, popular evangelical gospel singer. Since embracing a more liberal or mainline brand of theology, Phillips has gone to great lengths to distance herself from that past, and seems almost cheered that her turn as the tarty terrorist may cause any remaining affection for her in rigid religious circles to die easy.

“Yeah, this should drive the stake through the heart of any sort of fundamentalists that I don’t really want to be associated with, I would think,” she says. “Now I’ll really be the heretic.”

Not violently heretical, one presumes, but just in case--Rush Limbaugh, watch your back.*