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  It's every actor's worst nightmare:
After telling all your friends you've landed a major role in a big-budget Hollywood feature, you end up on the cutting-room
floor.
"Those [multiple-compound expletives] had me doing my own stunts," T'Nuk complains. "They had me spend six months
with some Shaolin [expletive] inventing a new martial art for my four-legged physique, then they [expletive] cut me. [Plural
expletive]."
T'Nuk thought she'd scored a major coup for quadruped thespians everywhere when she landed
a plum role in the Wachowski Brothers' back-to-back sequels to The Matrix. But after months of training and several
weeks of acting against a green screen and reacting to a legion of green-suited stand-ins for the principal cast, the foul-tempered
co-star of SCI FI's new original series Tripping the Rift sat down in her local multiplex to discover that not
a single one of her scenes had made it into the theatrical version of The Matrix Reloaded.
"I couldn't [expletive]
believe it," T'Nuk says. "What the [expletive] was I doing there? Why the [expletive] did they waste my [expletive] time?
I was told I would have a major role, that I'd be in scenes with Keanu Reeves! Those lying [plural expletive] Larry and Andy
Wachowski can kiss my fat, hairy ass."
Matrix trilogy co-director Andy Wachowski denies that he or his brother
misled T'Nuk regarding her role in the Matrix franchise. "We were very clear that we were hiring her to do some second-unit
work, not star in the principal shoot," he says. "I guess we could have been clearer that we were using her footage to make
the wrap-party gag reel for the cast and crew, but we wanted it to stay a secret."
As part of the festivities that
accompanied the end of a long and grueling production schedule on the two Matrix sequels, the Wachowski brothers commissioned
The Matrix ReChoded, a special self-parody of their own franchise. Using green-screen special effects, they composited
T'Nuk into a number of finished scenes from the movies, substituting her for female lead Carrie-Anne Moss.
Keanu Reeves,
who stars as Neo in the Matrix films, attests to the hilarity of the custom-made gag reel. "Dude, when I saw the dance-orgy
scene, with me humping that beast I almost hurled, I laughed so hard! Talk about bumping uglies!" Co-star Laurence Fishburne
was equally amused. "The poster alone was a work of genius," he says. "I'm having mine framed for posterity."
"I wish
we could take credit for the gag-reel idea," Larry Wachowski says, "but it was actually a friend of T'Nuk who pitched it to
us. Funny little purple guy named Chode. We named the gag film in his honor and sent him a crew jacket."
"Yeah, it
was my idea," Chode confesses. "I was gonna spike her Astroglide with Liquid Heat, but this was too good a gag to pass up."
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