If you don't know her yet, 40-year old Chinese actress Gong Li ("2046", "The Emperor and the Assassin") will soon be making more waves in Hollywood than ever before with three major American films opening in the next twelve months.

Out promoting the first "Memoirs of a Geisha" in New York over the weekend, she talked wth Dark Horizons about her roles in the other two - "Miami Vice" and "Young Hannibal":

"In Miami Vice I play the head of a drug cartel - so just like you were saying before she is sort of a bad girl. So there are a lot of special terms, kind of technical terms related to the drug trade that I had to learn very carefully" says Gong, who also revealed she'll have an interesting voice in the role - "Mann also has me playing a Cuban Chinese woman and so in addition to that I had to express the lines with a Cuban accent in English. I had a Cuban teacher and he has a very strong Cuban accent in English".

As for her role in "Young Hannibal", she says "I guess I play yet another sort of bad woman. In this case her role is to introduce the young Hannibal to a certain kind of world - a kind of life as it were - and so she has a very strong influence on his later development, as we see him in the other films, grow up to be an adult. And so it's through this kind of relationship, and maybe a bit of romance even, that she has a very strong impact on the shaping of his personality". In that role she'll speak English with a British accent.

The full interview will be available soon.

Thanks to 'Mary'