LOS ANGELES (TNA) – Helena Mattsson is hot right now. Actually, she's hot pretty much all the time, as evidenced by her new turn in "Species IV: The Awakening," the franchise's unrated, straight-to-DVD fourth installment, released earlier this month.

Oh, and there’s that recent fast food patty melt commercial.

But although Mattsson is young, blonde and gorgeous, she wants to make one thing clear, even though plenty of places on the Internet beg to differ: she isn't the now-infamous teacher from Carl's Jr's "Flat Buns" clip for the burger joint's new patty melt.

Helena Mattson and Scott Bakula star in 'Species IV: The Awakening.'

"That's not me, the teacher's not me!" she says. "That's somebody else. Someone misunderstood. I did a different one."

Which is true. The confusion is probably because Mattsson did do a patty melt ad, "Patty Melts for You," for Carl's Jr's partner in fast food crime, Hardees, where the 22-year-old Swede gets way too intimate with the flat buns of her burger. (link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksWlKw9QkF8)

Of course, that's nothing compared to what she does in "Species IV: The Awakening," where hopeful fans can finally see Mattsson playing a hot teacher, as well as a murderous alien hybrid, or if they just want to see her naked and getting it on.

"Usually I don't do nudity, but it made sense for the character and the plot," says Mattsson, whose character, Miranda, is a ridiculously hot, ridiculously intelligent college professor who discovers that, in fact, she's actually a lab creation whose sole purpose is to get pregnant and slaughter humans.

Yep, after Miranda is discovered, naked and unconscious in a local park, she's taken to a hospital where she wakes up and promptly slaughters most of the staff, courtesy of her forked, missile-like tongue.

Her "uncle" Tom (Ben Cross) injects her with human hormones, and explains that he's been sheltering her for 20 years, and that the only way to cure her is to pack up the truck and head to Mexico, where his old lab partner, the rogue scientist Forbes (Dominic Keating), is making a few bucks via unethical experiments.

Forbes, who keeps a pet hybrid – the sexy and murderous Azura (uber-hot Marlene Favela) – by his side, explains that Miranda, though she may be young and gorgeous, is actually dying of old age, and only a human stem cell transfusion can save her. But when she wakes up from the procedure, there's more alien and less human, and the first thing she wants to do is get busy, first with sweet Azura, then with her uncle, then with anyone she happens to run into, giving her plenty of reasons to take her clothes off the rest of the way.

But like a praying mantis, she doesn't have much interest in keeping her mates alive. In a local disco, she suggestively sticks her tongue into a guy's ear — and through the rest of his head, too. And when it comes down to her and Azura, there's only one way to settle which one of them is on top of the alien-hybrid totem pole — a nude alien-hybrid catfight!

For Mattsson, "Species" was her first film role after a number of TV appearances. The actress wasn't even much of a sci-fi fan before taking the part, but says that it grew on her in the course of the shoot.

"I kind of fell in love with it along the way," she says. "It's a lot of fun, all the surreal stuff, stepping out of reality for a second."

She says she wasn't very up close and personal with the previous franchise entries, but that was actually a good thing, allowing her to put her own stamp on the alien character.

"I tried to come up with my own interpretation," she says. "It's quite different from the previous ones. But I watched the earlier ones just to get some ideas and to see what it was all about."

One of the challenges she faced in the role was the sudden transformation her character undergoes.

"It's a shock, something that she's confused about," she says. "It ends up being two totally different characters. That was something new to me, to be the bad guy. It was so much fun to actually scare people!"

And the darker role seems to be paying off for Mattsson, who just shot an episode of "CSI." ("I play a psychopath."). And she just wrapped the film "Finding t.A.T.u.," directed by Roland Joffé ("The Killing Fields"), which finds her playing a drug-addicted Russian runaway.

And while she's happy with "Species," Mattson says she understands that if the film does well, the nudity and the sex are probably a big part of it.

"I didn't mind it so much. It was more like another one of Miranda's outfits. I didn't think too much about it."

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