TORONTO -- Maria Bello went to drastic measures to shed Edie Stall's skin.

	Takashi Seida Viggo Mortensen and Maria Bello left each other battered in real life in "A History of Violence." Click photo for larger image. Previous coverage Movie Review: 'A History of Violence'

After finishing director David Cronenberg's "A History of Violence," the actress shaved off her shaggy, streaked hair and took a long break to recover from the physical and emotional exhaustion.

"I've never been so drained from a part, I think. I got done Nov. 22 and didn't work again till April. I got home, shaved my head that first day -- all my hair -- and went, 'I've got to get out of this character.' She was overwhelming for me to a certain extent."

A passionate fight scene, staged on narrow wooden steps, had left Philadelphia native Bello and co-star Viggo Mortensen bruised. Literally.

"David likes to say the next day, we limped onto the set. My entire back was black and blue and purple. Viggo, his elbow was out to here, it was so swollen because he kept bumping it," and Bello had accidentally bitten the inside of his mouth, too.

As part of her decompression strategy, Bello spent time with her now 4-year-old son, took long walks and cooked, a skill she used during filming. She would dream up recipes while commuting to and from the West Coast on weekends.

"On Sundays, I would fly back, and I'd concoct recipes in my head. I'd come back to Toronto and pick up stuff for a sweet potato, tomato and garbanzo bean stew and I'd make these big vats of stuff and then on Monday, bring it to set."

In the film, which opened here on Friday, Bello plays Edie, the wife of Mortensen's Tom Stall. She is a lawyer, and he runs a diner in small Millbrook, Ind., where they live with their teenage son and young daughter.

They lead a happy, uneventful life until the night Tom foils a robbery and becomes a hero, with all the attendant media coverage. The attention attracts plenty of customers, including some unsavory characters who claim he's not small-town savior Tom Stall or Tom Stall at all, for that matter.

Nearly 10 months after that cathartic shearing, Bello was back in Toronto, where the movie -- also starring Ed Harris, William Hurt and young Ashton Holmes -- was made. This time, it was for the Toronto International Film Festival, where the thriller received the red-carpet gala treatment.

The next day, the actress was holed up in a hotel room, slicing her day into slivers of interviews and trying (unsuccessfully) to stave off a Starbucks pick-me-up. Her short blond hair was pulled off her face, and she had finished her outfit of jeans, sweater and jacket with glamorous boots accented with crisscross straps that weren't part of Edie's costume.

Everyone wants to know what message the movie is sending, and Bello quotes Cronenberg ("He's not interested in making a movie with a message, per se") and a favorite, unnamed author who said, "If I wanted to make it a message, I would have written it in one sentence; I've written a novel."

Still, she says, "David calls it a meditation on this theme of violence -- that could be violence in the world, violence in ourselves. I always come from a sort of psychological-emotional point of view because I'm the actor ... so I took it to be the darkness inside of all of us, our shadow selves and the repression of that shadow self and how that often leads to violence in the world."

Edie is a woman who seems to have everything figured out. "She's very in control, she's very like the man of the house. Very [Type] A personality. Everything's always kind of gone her way, she has the white picket fence."

By the movie's final scene, Edie ends up both free and terribly confused.

"The ending for her isn't so much about him as about, 'Oh my God, what am I going to do now? I've got these two kids, we're all complicated people and now what? It's not as easy as I thought it was; it's not as pretty as I thought it was.' "

Early in the movie, Edie dons and doffs a cheerleader's outfit in an explicit bedroom scene.

"I think that's such a great device that David uses for the thing about being covered up -- something on the surface, but what's really underneath there." Only when Edie begins to look at Tom -- and then back at herself -- does she examine her own reserve of rage, guilt, desire, pain and animal instinct.

The 38-year-old actress isn't afraid of taking risks or appearing in the sort of scenes that typically earn R ratings.

"I've always believed the sexuality of a character was no different than what they eat for breakfast. It's just all very human. I don't like to make a big thing out of it, I don't think it's a big thing, I think it's a normal thing."

Bello's career is on an upward trajectory because of roles in movies such as "The Cooler," in which she played a Vegas cocktail waitress opposite William H. Macy.

"It's funny, that was two years ago, and just now a lot of people are starting to discover it on DVD, which is cool. A lot of directors who really didn't know my work before are seeing it, and I'm getting some fantastic opportunities."

Among them is Oliver Stone's movie about two Port Authority police officers trapped in the ruins of the World Trade Center towers. She plays one of their wives, a real woman whom Bello describes as "kind and compassionate and strong," adding, "I feel so honored to be able to play her."

Now living in Venice, Calif., Bello returns to her hometown of Philadelphia regularly. This summer she spent two weeks on the Jersey shore. Her mother is an administrator at a Montgomery County vo-tech school, and her father is disabled.

She was on the pre-law track at Villanova University, with her sights set on human rights law, when she decided to become an actress. Still, she never abandoned the notion of what she calls giving something back, of having a purpose.

Bello co-founded the Dream Yard Drama Project for Kids, a not-for-profit arts and education program for children in Harlem, and has traveled to places such as Albania and Nicaragua on behalf of Save the Children.

"What I finally realized when I fell in love with acting is, if you do the thing that you love best, then you're giving back the most you can give, and so I've sort of been on that path for years and I know it's the right one."