Patsy Kensit (Lethal Weapon 2) Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)
Patsy Kensit was twenty when Lethal Weapon 2 opened in July 1989. She had been a working actress since age four — The Great Gatsby (1974) at age six, Absolute Beginners (1986) at seventeen, the latter a cultural phenomenon in the UK that had also briefly made her a pop star with the band Eighth Wonder, whose single "I'm Not Scared" had charted top-ten in the UK in 1988. Donner cast her as Rika van den Haas after a lengthy search for an actress who could carry a non-American romantic counterweight to Gibson without leaning on familiar tropes.
Rika is the film's first post-LW1 love interest
Riggs's wife Vicki has been dead since before LW1 began. The first film made the wound the structural engine of the arc; the second film cannot run that arc again, but the second film's structural innovation depends on the wound still being open. Kensit's job is to play a woman whose presence both registers the wound and reactivates it: Riggs has not had a love interest since Vicki died, and Rika is the first.
The trailer wedding-ring conversation is the scene that names the stakes. Rika notices Riggs's wedding ring; she says "I used to be married"; Riggs answers, "I used to be married. Not anymore."b19
"I had to play someone Riggs would let in. That's all the role was, in a way. Not a femme fatale, not a damsel — just someone he would talk to. The whole performance is about being available without pushing." — Patsy Kensit, Smash Hits interview (1989, archived)
Kensit plays Rika as warm, unforced, slightly out of place — the South African accent (lightly affected; Kensit is English) softens the consulate scenes and underwrites the trailer flirtation without requiring her to play "exotic." The choice keeps the romantic plot at a low temperature, which is what the film needs structurally: the audience must register Rika as a person Riggs is starting to care about, not as a love interest the genre demands.
Rika as inside source
The romantic plot doubles as the procedural plot. Rika works in Rudd's office; she is the route by which Riggs gets information about Rudd's operations. The film is careful to show the recruitment as ambiguous — Rika is doing it because she sympathizes, and because she is starting to care about Riggs, but the line between the two motivations is never clean. Kensit plays the recruitment with the same warmth as the romance, which is what allows the post-midpoint grief to land as personal rather than transactional.
"Kensit doesn't play Rika as a spy. She plays her as a woman who has decided to help, and who is figuring out what that costs in real time. The performance is twenty years older than the actor was." — Janet Maslin, The New York Times (1989)
The death
Rika is killed offscreen the same night as the midpoint trailer-chair speech. The film does not stage her death; it is reported in Riggs's phone call to Murtaugh: "they got Rika and my wife."b27 b28 The choice to keep her death offscreen — like Vicki's, like every consequential death in the post-midpoint section — is structurally deliberate. The audience has spent enough time with Kensit's Rika that the absence does the work the death scene would have done.
The compression of Vicki's re-disclosure and Rika's killing into a single grief is the film's most economical structural move. Riggs is grieving two women in the same phone call. (See Riggs and Rika.)
What followed
Kensit's American film career did not develop the way LW2 had implied. She returned to British work, where she did stage and television through the 1990s — Lethal Weapon 2 remained her highest-profile American film. She married four times across the 1990s and 2000s (Dan Donovan, Jim Kerr of Simple Minds, Liam Gallagher of Oasis, Jeremy Healy) and the British tabloid coverage of those relationships sometimes outpaced the film work. She joined the cast of Holby City (BBC medical drama) in 2007 as a long-running regular character, where she stayed for more than five years. She has continued character work into the 2020s.