(I’m only posting this photo because Bill Paxton is one of the greatest American character actors of the last 30 years. That’s Bill Paxton, right? Or is it Bill Pullman. I can never keep those two straight. Anyway, daaaaaamn.)

While reporting on the New York premiere of Haywire for Fightlinker, author Matthew Polly landed a one-on-one interview with star Gina Carano, in which he got Gina to confirm what we all suspected — that you’re not hearing her actual voice in the film:

POLLY: [W]hen I was listening to the movie your voice sounded a little different to me. I know this has been brought up in other media outlets but I didn’t know if they tweaked the sound or that’s just how it came out in the movie.

GINA: Yeah absolutely and I’m surprised that hasn’t come up sooner. Stephen Soderberg wanted Mallory Kane [the character she plays in the movie] to be a completely different entity than Gina Carano. So he definitely went in and I went in to AVR and he did some tweaking. We all knew that that was going to come up because people know me so well in the MMA world. But he is quite a genius in what he has created and it still was an honor to be a part of it.

(A joy so pure, so simple, it can only come from two ice cream cones.)

Noted author and smug smartass Matthew Polly traveled to Russia to witness firsthand Fedor Emelianenko’s loss at the Sambo World Championships in St. Petersburg in November.  He tells the tale in an article for Slate.com that contains several interesting insights about Russia and none of the cloying, faux-intellectual bullshit that usually finds its way into any Slate article (“Was Kevin Costner’s ‘Waterworld’ an Ahead-of-Its-Time Eco-Parable?” asks one such article.  No, asshole.  No it wasn’t).   

While the whole thing is interesting, even if you don’t care about Russian history or why St. Petersburg is a bizarrely beautiful and yet poorly-designed city, the last page is where we get serious about the mystery of Fedor.  What we end up learning, though, both in the Slate article and the full post-Sambo loss interview on Fightlinker, is that Fedor is either too nice to be interesting or else an impenetrable enigma.  And maybe we just choose to believe the latter because it’s more fun.