The Mummy’s Patricia Velasquez Looks Back at the Universal Monsters Classic

Yet the makeup stayed, and by the end of her 10-day shoot, they had the scene. Velásquez also might’ve had a fever. Looking back, she likens the experience a bit to what happened to Shirley Eaton’s character in Goldfinger. “I remember there was a Bond Girl that died from body painting,” Velásquez says. “They left a hole in the back so my skin could breathe, but even then I still got sick. Thank God not as bad!”

Despite the challenges though, Velásquez is proud of what they accomplished: “It was an idea we were able to execute, and I had modeled for so many years that I was used to that kind of work. Once you forget about it, it just really helps you with the character, even more than in The Mummy 2. There I had the bodysuit, but there was nothing like actually having the paint.”

Talk Like an Egyptian

The time onscreen offered by the original The Mummy was small yet pivotal. It was also colored by smart decisions, such as having Vosloo and Velásquez speak in ancient Egyptian—or at least an approximation of it since we can only speculate about how that dead language used its vowels. Both actors worked heavily with a UCLA linguist who taught them the lines phonetically; a process that might have come easier to Velásquez than it would most since all her life she’s been picking up languages, including Spanish, English, French, and Italian. To this day, she still recalls the lines she learned for The Mummy via the muscle memory in her throat.

Perhaps the other great strength of the movie (at least as an entertainment) is to know when to bend that loose authenticity.

“I do remember one time… when they told us that ‘no’ was ‘eee-ah,” Velásquez explains while enunciating the sound. “But then I started screaming eee-ah [in one shot], and then again in another take. I’m screaming EEE-AH on this really big set, and at this point I’m screaming so much I’m starting to lose my voice. So finally Stephen calls me to the side and he says, ‘Why are you screaming ‘eee-ah?’ And I say, ‘Stephen, you said you wanted this to be as authentic as possible. Eee-ah is ‘no.’ And he said, ‘Oh no! No, no, no, no. Just say no.’ And at this point I had no voice left.”

A Return for The Mummy Returns

The striking thing about Sommers’ The Mummy is, like the 1932 Boris Karloff film it remade, the movie is technically a love story. It’s a supernatural yarn about a man who loved a woman so much, he betrayed the gods and his station to steal her back from death. Despite its Egyptian pedigree, it’s a slightly spookier and Hollywoodized version of the Orpheus myth from ancient Greece. This sweeping romantic quality also gave Velásquez, and subsequently the movie audience, something to wrap their arms around.