Karina Karina a Delicious Double Exposure

The other afternoon actress Karina Lombard wasn't doing much of anything but lounging around her house in Los Angeles after starting her day the way she usually does, by cleaning her tongue with a tongue scraper and jogging on the beach. She was still wearing her sweatpants. Karina, 36, with long, dark cascading hair, looked out a window at her garden and said happily, "Everything is very green right now. It's an easy life here."

Early in her acting career the current star of the USA Network's The 4400 had small parts in good movies (Legends of the Fall, The Firm) and larger parts in movies that sucked (Kull the Conqueror, Exposé). Last year she was the breakout star of Showtime's steamy lesbian melodrama The L Word, playing Marina Ferrer, a temptress to the uninitiated in the ways of girl-on-girl love. In so doing she apparently also woke up many a woman in the national viewing audience.

"Thank you so much!" these newly converted sapphists said.

"Glad to be of help," Karina said.

Those days of gratitude are over, however, because the program's producers didn't invite her back for the show's second season. She thinks she knows why. "I became popular, and I guess that's not good," she said. "And then suddenly with the rest of the cast it became all about politics, ego and who's the better flatterer, all stuff I can't stand."

She shrugged and smiled. "Anyway, I did the show because it was dangerous and my character was dangerous, and what happened on the show happened with a lot of tension and buildup. But now there's no more tension in the show. It's become just about girls doing it."

As it happens, in real life Karina has done it with both boys and a number of women, though of late the women have maybe been getting short shrift. "Before The L Word," she said, "I thought I was bisexual, but I don't know anymore. Doing it with women on the (text concluded on page 136)Karina Lombard(continued from page 70) show got so repetitive that it took the edge off doing it with women off the show. It got associated with work in my brain and kind of ruined it."

She sighed and looked at her garden again. "The weather is always beautiful here," she said. "I'm never in the sun, though. Putting on oil and doing the whole steak thing doesn't do it for me."

She went on to say that she was born in Tahiti to a Lakota medicine woman and a European aristocrat. After they parted ways, she moved with her dad to Switzerland and Spain, attending various boarding schools and learning to make her bed in the morning, every morning, a habit that has stuck. Discovered by photographer Bruce Weber in her teens, she eventually wound up in Hollywood, acting opposite Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.

"Brad is so cute," she said. "I just love that man. Tom is more serious, more like a businessman maybe." She once told an interviewer that as a kisser Cruise rated only a six on a scale of one to 10. Shortly thereafter rumors began to circulate that Cruise had blacklisted her in the business. Until this day, however, Karina herself had never heard those rumors.

"They say he did that?" she cried out. "Oh, I hope not. That would be horrible! Hmm. Actually, I did have a tough time for a while." She thought about that briefly and then about herself and her recent departure from The L Word. "No matter what I do I raise people's passions," she said. "Even if I'm in my trailer counting beans, some people always go off and have all these plans to destroy me. It's strange. What can I say?"

A while later, almost out of the blue, she said she liked her meat raw and that three days ago, in fact, she'd eaten a raw New York strip steak.

"People are like, 'You're not going to eat that, are you?' And I'm like, 'Watch me!' I cut it really thin, put on olive oil and ate it. With raw, everything is just the way you see it. Nothing is covered in sauce."

A few moments passed. "Actually, you know what I just realized?" she went on. "I don't wear perfume, I rarely wear jewelry, I can't kiss ass, I'm very frank, very honest. With me, what you see is what you get. I know it hurts me. People tell me to pretend this, pretend that, but I don't want to pretend anything. So what I realized is that I eat how I live." She laughed and then said, "Yes, that's it."

Thanks to the magic of digital graphics, both of the women in these pictures are Karina Lombard. As the saying goes, you can't love someone until you love yourself.

See more of Karina at cyber.playboy.com.