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Such were the seeming requirements of the actress cast in the lead role of USA's new television series, La Femme Nikita, based on the 1990 French-Italian film of the same name and its 1993 American remake, Point of No Return. Both deal with a violently rebellious young woman recruited against her will into a secret and enigmatic organization and trained as a deadly assassin. Despite her best efforts to create a life for herself, she is inextricably trapped.

"I knew this was going to be an extremely difficult role to cast," says Joel Surnow, executive consultant of the series, which has become cable's highest rated live-action show, "because Nikita has got to be young, she's got to be incredibly attractive and run the gamut from raw violence to soft, tender moments. We searched all over the place and the irony is that we ended up casting the third girl that came in for the part."

For the series, Nikita is being essayed by model turned actress Peta Wilson, a native of Australia whose background is as fascinating as any fictional character. She spent the first ten years of her life in the jungles of New Guinea with her father, who Surnow likens to a cross between Rambo and Harrison Ford's character in The Mosquito Coast. Her teenage years were spent in Australia where she became a top model before coming to America and attending Juliard to perfect her thespian skills.

"Three weeks after moving to New York," the 41-year-old Surnow notes, "she was mugged and moved to LA, figuring that she'd rather live there. Over the past four years she's been perfecting her skills and now everyone who sees her says, 'My God, there's something special about her.'"

And for Surnow, who most recently served as supervising producer of UPN's Nowhere Man and writer of the Ken Wahl TV revival of Wiseguy, there's something special about Nikita as well.

"Interestingly," he says, "a lot of the same qualities and shadings that you find in Wiseguy you find in Nikita, particularly in terms of the idea of dealing with a kind of tortured soul. You're dealing with an operative moving through a dangerous, violent world while trying to carve a little piece of a real life for herself."

He admits that there had been some resistance to the show's premise by USA due to the fact that several years ago they had produced a series named Matrix whose lead character was morally ambiguous as well. To placate the network, some subtle changes were altered and the series was finally given the green light by CEO Rod Perth.

"Our main alteration is that she's not quite the psychotic criminal she had been in the film," Surnow explains. "She's a street girl, but it turns out that she was in the wrong place at the wrong time and accused of killing a cop, which she didn't do. So she comes out of the 'program' two years later after all this training and isn't aware that they had found out she was innocent but didn't do anything about it because she's so talented and special. She is eternally trying to get out of this situation and have a real life for herself, and can't. I call it an action tragedy."

In some ways, Surnow considers La Femme Nikita a female version of Wiseguy, though unlike that critically lauded series it does not deal with a single storyline over several episodes. "USA doesn't even want to do two-part episodes," he laughs. "I think on this show we can do B-story arcs. Our show isn't going to be about how interesting the criminals are anyway. Nikita has got to be the most interesting person on the show and, in a way, her trying to forge a life for herself and being slammed down each week is going to be sort of an interesting thing to watch. It's conceivable we can have, for example, a several episode boyfriend arc that runs through the episodes while you still do the stand-alone crime story of the week. Elements would continue, showing growth and it makes it even more poignant that she puts so much time in to something and they ultimately take it away from her.

"In the early stages of development," he adds, "one of the questions we explored was exactly what types of situations she'll get involved with. There is a concern that American audiences don't really respond to international spy stories; that they like their crime stories neat -- you know, 'He's the bad guy, he's the killer, he's hurting this person, go get him.' When it gets into Le Carre territory with 'Who's the good guy, who's the bad guy in the shadowy gray world of the CIA?', I think what we're going to try and do is kind of visceral CIA stories. Like hostage situations, terrorists, and international drug dealers -- maybe on a bigger scale, but still accessible. We will be doing some undercover material. I think we have to use the fact that this is a young, beautiful woman and would be the last person you'd think who would go into a high-tech plane or into the world of terrorists. I think we can't not use the unexpected nature of her appearance as this lethal weapon."

Surnow himself has been something of a lethal weapon within the action genre. Born in Michigan, he and his parents -- both of whom were in "the business" -- moved to Los Angeles when he was ten years old, where he grew up surrounded by Hollywood. His best friend in high school was Frank Sutton, who portrayed Sgt. Carter on Gomer Pyle USMC, and he dated the daughter of famed horror director William Castle. He attended Berkeley for a couple of semesters before transferring to UCLA Film School in 1976, and began writing immediately. His first script was called Small Time, which "John Cassevettes wanted to make at one point and then he had to go and die, which really screwed up my feature career," he jokes." Shifting to television, he wrote some early episodes of St. Elsewhere and joined the staff of Steven Bochco's short-lived look at minor league baseball, Bay City Blues.

"Then I got hooked in to Miami Vice where I became head writer first season and literally wrote almost all of that show," Surnow explains. "There was no writing staff because Michael Mann kept firing everybody."

He shifted over to the first season of the Edward Woodward starrer The Equalizer, and then dropped back in to development, feeling he was burned out from his experiences on both that show and Miami Vice, and a divorce he was going through at the time. He -- ironically -- turned down Wiseguy and didn't start writing again for a couple of years, returning for the final season of the CBS prime time soap Falcon Crest, where he was given creative carte blanche.

"We did the best unseen season of television ever produced," he smiles. "We outdid Twin Peaks, doing such crazy shit for that show. It wasn't as obscure or artsy as Twin Peaks, but it was really a wild season."

The short-lived TV version of Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure was next, followed by the development of the unproduced 50 Minute Man, a different kind of cop show that was book-ended by the cop's visits to his therapist. In 1992 he moved to England for a one-season stint on Covington Cross, and developed the series Point Man (starring Jack Scalia) which aired for a season in first-run syndication. Two years on the staff of The Commish ensued, and then he became supervising producer of Nowhere Man, which chronicled the adventures of photographer Thomas Veil (Bruce Greenwood), whose existence seems to have been wiped out by an all-encompassing conspiracy tied to a photo he took of an execution in a third world country. While the show began innovatively and with UPN's second highest ratings (following Star Trek: Voyager), the audience dropped off significantly due to the show's lack of a concrete direction and the fact that one never knew what to believe.

"The show grew to piss me off," says Surnow candidly. "Honestly, I don't know if there was enough in the concept to do twenty-five episodes. I felt like we would go down the track and do a couple of episodes ala The Prisoner, then after three or four shows like that we'd do some Three Days of the Condor government conspiracy kind of shows, and so on. It's like we did twenty-five episodes that had four or five different types of shows. The premise didn't suggest a ton of material. I think there's a reason that a show like The Prisoner only ran seventeen episodes. I'm sure they ran out of ways to jerk off the audience. Nowhere Man was like a gigantic jerk-off. [Series creator] Larry [Hertzog] always looked at the show as The Prisoner; he didn't think it needed to go anywhere. He just wanted the shows to be allegorical and didn't feel that they needed to have a linear progression. As a result, the show was limited. Sometimes it needed to just be a good meat and potatoes TV show. That's what I liked about Wiseguy. In a way it was an unpretentious TV show; on some levels it was just a good cop show."

Wiseguy ran on CBS from 1987-1990 and cast Ken Wahl as Vinnie Terranova, an undercover agent for the Organized Crime Bureau who would infiltrate criminal organizations in an attempt to bring them down. In Surnow's revival, Vinnie has moved from mobsters and New York City to the computer industry in California, where Paul Calendar (Ted Levine) sells classified information to the highest bidder. A classic Wiseguy moment occurs halfway into the movie when Calendar is murdered and the drama goes off in a different direction.

The new Wiseguy was designed to serve as the beginning of a series of movies on ABC, but the network essentially dumped it against a one-hour episode of Seinfeld and the E.R. juggernaut. Despite the film's lackluster ratings, Surnow is proud of his efforts.

"The problem with the movie is that Ted Levine should have been there through the whole thing, because he's so great and the scenes between he and Ken Wahl were wonderful. Yet his death gave the film the kind of shocking twist that captures the best elements of Wiseguy, which was our intention. We wanted to recapture the spirit of the first season of Wiseguy," he says of the episodes that pit Wahl against Ray Sharkey's Sonny Steelgrave and Kevin Spacey's Mel Profitt. "And I think in many ways we managed to do that. But besides accomplishing that goal, I felt like I was trying to create some new feeling. It was set on the West Coast, it was ten years later, it wasn't the same dynamic between Vinnie and the OCB. The world was different and I wanted to create a newer -- and I hate to say '90s, because it's so cliché -- look to the show. That didn't get fully accomplished as far as I was concerned. I see all the things I wished I had done a little differently. But I'm proud of it. For me it got about 85% of the way there. There are some sequences in there that stand up to anything that I've done and the best of what that show is all about. In terms of doing a two-hour movie and making it all work as one piece rather than in the arc format, I think that it needed a little more dramatic punch somewhere toward the end. All in all, though, I'm happy with it."

As he is about his career in general. While overseeing La Femme Nikita, he feels that he has essentially come full circle and regained what he had at the end of the 1980s, writing for some of the darker, more quality-laden series on the air.

"In 1992 when I was doing Covington Cross, all the heat I had from Miami Vice and The Equalizer had evaporated," he says matter of factly. "I was in the position of having to take a step back and it's kind of what you do in the second act of your career sometimes. You basically have to reinvent yourself, which I did. Now here I am on Nikita, doing a good one-hour action show. I'm back where I started, and it feels great."

When the casting process for the lead role in USA's La Femme Nikita began, executive consultant Joel Surnow knew he had his work cut out for him -- until he met 26-year-old Peta Wilson.

"Peta grew up in the wilds of New Guinea and part of her has never left," says Surnow, who guides the weekly spin-off from the French film of the same name. "She's got this incredible combination of rawness, vulnerability, sensuality and unpredictability -- equal parts of all four of those things. It's a very tough part to play and you've got to be a lot of different things. She is. We read 200 different women and there wasn't even a close second."

In the TV version, Nikita is a young woman wrongly accused of murder who is forced into a secret government agency known as the Section, an organization whose ruthless means of protecting this country uses people like pawns. If Nikita goes along with their objective of turning her into an operative/assassin, she lives. If not....

"Nikita has got to have the physicality to be an operative, a lethal weapon, yet at the same time this is a girl who wasn't a killer," Surnow explains. "She's got to bring to it some heroism and real human appeal. Like Wiseguy, we're trying to disguise a drama show as an action show. You have to use an actor with those chops, and she has them. What's surprising to me is that she's never done anything on film before, yet she's adapted to the medium beautifully."

A native of Australia and raised in New Guinea, Wilson's formative years were spent as an "Army Brat." She traveled often with her family, which played no small part in fostering her love for acting. It began with she and her brother, due to a lack of television in New Guinea, performing shows for family and friends, and took root as the family continued to move around. Unable to establish long-term relationships with friends, Wilson found that she would have to quickly adapt, sizing up social situations and act in whatever manner would help her fit in. Ironically, it was the perfect training ground for essaying the role of Nikita; a role she was hired for six years after moving to America.

Wilson, who began her career in the theater, had been auditioning for seven months and came close to several features, but inevitably lost out to "name" actresses. Ready to head to New York and the theater circuit, she only remained in LA at the insistence of her agent who recommended she try television. To her amazement, she auditioned for and found herself wanted by three different shows -- a western, a sitcom and Nikita. Obviously, she chose the latter.

"I thought this was a great opportunity, because everything is acceptable for the character," says Wilson, who expresses gratitude to the various executives behind the show who took a chance on her. "I knew this would be a great place to get my chops wet because the character is limitless. Nikita has to constantly adjust to new situations and never forget that the people she works for are killers. Sometimes she completely denies that they are, just to get through it, but it's often like treading on glass. I think she'll never believe the Section is a great thing. She understands that her work is important, but at the same time although their ends are just, their means are ruthless. The only way to beat these guys is to join them and be better than them at what they do. Then you can get them. So it's all about her taking information now and covering the fact that she's never going to be like them, while letting them think she's becoming the spy they want her to be. It's always up her sleeve that she's not and one day she'll spring and get them, or have them at her mercy. It's kind of like she's biding her time, like a panther. Waiting. Watching them. Studying them."

One thing that does not influence her performance, she emphasizes, is the original 1990 French film or the American remake starring Bridget Fonda, 1993's Point of No Return.

"I saw the French film when it first came out years ago and loved it," she smiles. "I sat there and said, 'I can do that.' When I got the show and went in for the audition, my manager said, 'You ARE this role, just go in and have fun.' So I sort of went in, tore up offices and did all kinds of things and just had a great time. Nikita has changed a lot from the feature, because it's for television and you have to turn it down and tame it down. In the first few episodes I was full on, right out there and the executives were a little nervous, so I pulled it back a bit. So I really didn't need to see the movies to find out who she was. I sort of approached it as I would any character in any play, and probably did way too much work. But it helps in that my mind is full of the character's thoughts."

As well as potential roads the role may travel. Primarily, Wilson would love to see the job truly get to Nikita to the point where she is first emotionally and, then, physically affected by what she does. She compares the possibilities to Martin Sheen's performance in Apocalypse Now as a character that is transformed by his experiences in Vietnam.

"You might not see that color yet, but it's at the back of my mind, always, as the actress playing the part of Nikita," says Wilson. "I'd like to see her become really affected by having to do these jobs. I'd like to see her deal with ulcers and the audience see how it really must feel. I'd love to see her watching old movies in which women are being bad girls, giving her an idea of the kind of things she'll try. Maybe she'll completely submerge herself into playing characters so that when I go in and do these jobs, it's not really me. I'll be able to justify it because I'm somebody else."

Wilson's voice grows more enthusiastic as she considers ways in which the character of Nikita can expand and evolve. "There will come a point where the Section is very happy with her, but eventually you see her start to unravel," she muses. "The makeup's a little rough, things aren't quite right. Over the course of three episodes you see Nikita fall apart to the point where she actually lets somebody go because she can't do it anymore. But then he goes to kill her and she has no choice but to kill him. She stands over the body and wants to know, 'Why the fuck didn't you just go?' She disappears and they can't find her. Five days later, she's found in a sewer around the body doing a whole looney tunes thing. What comes out of that is, 'Hey, I can't hide from it any longer. I AM a killer.' Then she becomes like James Bond."