Maggie Q: game acting is "coooool!"

Actress Maggie Q, star of Need for Speed Undercover, reckons videogames have work to do before Hollywood accepts them as a viable acting vehicle.

However, as a measure of how far the medium had progressed, she said there had been "no adverse reaction" to her part in the street-racing game, and that lots of people even thought the idea was "cool".

"I think there's just too much that we don't know about [videogames] that it's hard to say, 'Oh, you're doing that?' Because, guess what, this world in its own right - in any right - is huge," Maggie Q told MTV Multiplayer.

"It's honestly hard to judge a world that you don't know. I think for Hollywood and for the acting world...I was sort of like, 'Oh my gosh, what's this going to mean to me if I'm going to do a videogame?' I sort of thought about it for a while.

"Everyone I've mentioned it to, honestly - actors, directors, producers, people I've worked with...I've just gotten back from a movie last week, and all the guys I worked with were like, 'Where you going?' And I told them I was doing this game and they were like, 'Coooool!'" she added

Maggie Q, noted for work on Mission Impossible III and Die Hard 4.0, joins the Need for Speed series on the tail of celebrities such as Kate from Lost and Brook Burke.

Her comments echo those of Joe Kucan (Kane from the Command & Conquer series), who told us earlier in the year that there was a lingering element of snobbery in Hollywood towards videogame actors.

"I think there's still snobbery; I think there's still a massive misunderstanding about what the work actually is," Kucan told Eurogamer.

Need for Speed Undercover is due out on every imaginable format in November, and is much more than just some wise advice from an older brother.