"I was an idiot,” says the super-slim Maggie Q, legs squeezed into impossibly tight jeans, eyes covered by massive Valentino shades to fend off the glare of the Santa Monica sun. “I had no idea what I was doing. I had people screaming at me, ‘You think you’re a talent? You have no talent!’ And I couldn’t argue with them, because I didn’t.”

We are sitting on the beach-side terrace of the Loews Hotel, and 26-year-old Maggie Quigley is enjoying some of her last moments of anonymity in the West before she hits our screens opposite Tom Cruise in Mission: Impossible III. As one of Asia’s top supermodels for 10 years, with campaigns for everyone from Shiseido to Louis Vuitton, she was used to being dogged by the paparazzi in her home town of Hong Kong, but it wasn’t until she crossed over into martial arts movies that she became a huge star. However, the transition from model to tough girl wasn’t easy.

“The directors all liked me to be rough with my fighting; they didn’t want me to look like a Charlie’s Angel. They wanted me to look like a chick who would kick your ass, no kidding, like a street fighter.”

And that wasn’t the only thing she had to learn. Brought up in Hawaii, she was used to the western way of doing things. Going on set with Jackie Chan and others, she was amazed to discover that she was expected to keep her mouth shut.

“They’re very conservative in Asia,” says Maggie, whose baptism of fire came when, scandalously, she appeared topless in one of her early films. “Being sexy or overt in your language is not encouraged. When I would speak my mind to people — which is how I like to deal with things — that was shocking to them. They always said, ‘Oh, she’s too western because she’s too outspoken; she’s too honest.’ Asian men don’t want to be outsmarted, they don’t want you to tell them they’re wrong. There were times when I had to pull back on that, and it bothered me because I felt I wasn’t being who I am.”

Quigley — she changed her name to Maggie Q because it is more easily pronounceable to an Asian audience — is the daughter of an American father and a Vietnamese mother, who met during the Vietnam war. As such, her English is perfect, while she still struggles with Cantonese and Mandarin. A track star in high school, she went to Hong Kong when she was 18 to model, so she could earn money to pay her university fees. “I planned to stay two months and it’s ended up being nine years.”

After about a year, she was approached by Chan’s company — Chan is now her manager in Asia — and asked if she wanted to be an actress. Now, she is probably Asia’s biggest female martial arts star.

The fame and scandal that dog her in Asia have shades of the familiar about it to any western It girl or actress. Quigley is linked to almost any man she’s seen with, and recalls one occasion when some friends asked her to go out on a boat with them in Hong Kong. She didn’t know the owner of the boat, but it later turned out that he was a wealthy and notorious local figure.

“One of these really fat, disgusting tycoon types,” she says. “You know what I’m talking about.” Twenty-four hours later, her day on the boat was all over one of the leading Hong Kong papers. “And the headline of the article was ‘Maggie Q does not get out of bed for under $200m!’ Apparently, this gangster’s boat was worth HK$200m. I didn’t even know the guy, and it turned out he was the biggest slimebag in the world. Now, for ever more, whenever they write bad things about him, my photo is there, with, ‘He was once with Maggie Q.’ It’s awful. People were saying, ‘She’s so disgusting; she’s dating fat, rich geezers.’ What the hell am I supposed to say to that?”

What particularly upsets her, she says, is that she is singularly unimpressed by “rich men and the way they act and how they feel they are entitled to everyone, and every woman and every situation. They piss me off with their arrogance. I couldn’t be more different to that”.

She was also shocked when she ended up on another boat, this time in St Tropez, with some big rap stars. People were openly having sex all over the boat.

“It was so strange,” she says. “I had fun with my friends down there, but the number of men who flock to St Tropez, and the number of women who go there to get picked up by these men, so that hopefully they will have a life they don’t have to pay for — it was amazing. That whole game is shocking.”

Instead, Maggie thinks that celebrities have an obligation to use their fame for social causes rather than personal gain. She herself is trying to help people in Vietnam who have been affected by the use of Agent Orange, the defoliant the Americans used during the Vietnam war that caused thousands of deaths, injuries and birth defects in subsequent generations.

But now, about to set out on a month of publicity for Mission: Impossible III, Maggie is happiest when she can spend a bit of time at home, with her friends and her dogs. She has five, all strays that she has rescued. “Dogs are people, too,” she says. “That’s what I think. Yes, I’m really just the crazy old dog lady. I have to say, as the setting sun twinkles on her sunglasses and she looks every inch the gorgeous international superstar, I’m extremely unconvinced.

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