Supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whitely turns up the heat in the third installment of the 'Transformers' franchise; [Inset] seen here with co-star Shia LaBeouf

MANILA, Philippines – “I loved doing the action stuff.”

Rosie Huntington-Whitely may be a supermodel as well as this year’s hottest woman in the world according to Maxim US, but clearly she’s up to task when it comes to the physical demands of her role in “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.”

“I love being physical—that, for me, was when I felt the most present. And I really enjoyed that side of it because it was so exciting,” she relates. “The sets are so realistic, there’s gunfire and explosions and it looks like the end of the world; and you are running through fire and jumping over broken cars and you’ve got (director) Michael (Bay) screaming down the megaphone, ‘Run faster!’”

Rosie plays Carly, the new girl in Sam Witwicky’s (Shia LaBeouf) life. Following the exit of Megan Fox from the franchise, who played Mikaela in the first two installments before being fired from the third film—apparently at the behest of producer Steven Spielberg after she compared Michael’s on-set rules to Hitler—Rosie adds the much-needed feminine energy to the whole macho vibe of the movie.

Interestingly, of all things that would be a true challenge to her on set, it would be that she needed to learn how to run.  “That’s sounds silly I know, but you have to run properly on a film set,” Rosie shares. “And it was the one thing that kept coming up. When I first got the film, the whole cast was boys, and they kept looking at me going, ‘Can you run?’

“And I was like, ‘Well, yeah, of course I can run, what are you talking about?’ Michael was like, ‘You better learn how to run...’ Because apparently, it’s not as easy as it looks, running in a movie, and then I was given a lovely pair of heels to run in so that made it a little more difficult!”

Although she was able to switch to flats for other scenes that didn’t require her feet to be shown, she still had to go through a lot of running scenes in heels. “So I worked really hard and everyone looked after me. But, you know, I was really up for the challenge.”

Over the course of all the running and jumping around, Rosie had not only rolled her ankles a few times, she ended up with bruises and iced bandages, proving that explosions aren't the only dangerous things on the "Transformers" set. “And then I was told to put on what they call stunt pads. No one had told me that I could wear stunt pads until after I had received all my bruises,” she laughs.

She also had to go through a crash course of acting with imaginary co-stars—the travails of doing a sci-fi action film with alien robots and large-scale destruction.  “We shot this whole movie over seven months and you don’t even know what you are doing half the time, because you are acting to nothing or you are running through something that you can’t see or something going on behind you. And then you start seeing stuff on the screen and you go, ‘Oh right, that’s what he was talking about.'”

But Rosie is pretty excited about how it all turned out. “You see the special effects all being pulled together and it just looks insane and it’s like a whole other movie that I’m now watching and I’m so, so proud of him and I’m really proud of everybody.”

See Rosie run and watch the Autobots and the Decepticons battle it out beginning June 29 as “Transformers: Dark of the Moon” opens in local cinemas nationwide.