Rebecca Romijn doesn't consider herself much of a Colombian scholar. "All I knew about Cartagena was that it's where Kathleen Turner was trying to get to in Romancing the Stone," she says of the balmy South American setting for ELLE's cover shoot. Once she arrived she ignored rumors about kidnapped tourists, ditched her escort, and fearlessly embarked on a sightseeing expedition of the mysterious old city. This is, after all, a woman who in her previous incarnation as a globe-traveling supermodel stared down a hippopotamus in Kenya and narrowly escaped hurricanes in the Bahamas.

Romijn and the X-Men faithfuls (including Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman and Halle Berry) certainly didn't disappoint the hordes of fans who made the first two movies into box-office hits, which together grossed nearly $400 million. "When we were doing the first one, we had no idea what we were making," she admits. "Most of us weren't familiar with the X-Men. But we all followed what the fan boards were saying on the Internet. It was so crazy. We totally felt the pressure.

Marvel Studios president Avi Arad was in talks with Jonathan Hensleigh, screenwriter of a row of hits, including Die Hard With a Vengeance and Armageddon, to direct an updated adaptation of The Punisher. Arad knew Romijn well from the X-Men films: "I really wanted her for this movie; the attraction was to dirty her up, if you will."

For her next flick, The Punisher, Romijn returns to the world of Marvel Comics. "Marvel is a popular genre these days," she explains. "I did it because the part I play in the X-Men movies is the opposite of the part I play in The Punisher. Her name is Joan and she lives next door to the Punisher. She's sort of the love interest. She's the mousy recovering drug addict and kind of a loser. She's totally the opposite of Mystique, who is an evil badass."