The FIGHT stuff

Captain America star Frank Grillo gets tough in his other big threequel this summer…

The Purge: Election Year Starring Frank Grillo, Elizabeth Mitchell Director James DeMonaco ETA 15 July

If you’re looking for a bodyguard, you could do worse than hiring Frank Grillo. The star of The

Purge: Election Year – third film in the lean, mean action franchise – knows a thing or two about fighting dirty. While The Purge: Anarchy tipped his granite-jawed hero – referred to only as ‘Sergeant’ – into the waking nightmare of a futuristic ‘Purge’, in which all crime is legal in America for 12 hours, The Purge: Election Year truly pushed him to his limits.

“There’s a serious fight sequence I have that goes on for about seven or eight minutes,” the 50-year-old actor reveals, speaking with all the insouciance of a guy accustomed to a cinematic scrap or 12. “I got some serious bumps and bruises from that. There were missed punches. We’re not supposed to get punched in the face; I was getting punched in the face... I had a loose tooth, it was very physical.”

Not that he cried himself to sleep afterwards. “Oh, I loved it,” Grillo enthuses. “I box often, so I’m used to getting punched in the face.” Business as usual for Grillo, then, but things have moved on a bit for Sergeant in the two years since The Purge: Anarchy (that film saw him embarking on a vengeful rampage to kill the man responsible for his son’s death). Having discovered the fight’s much bigger than petty vendettas, Sergeant’s buried the past and returned to duty, protecting a US senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) who’ll abolish the Purge if she’s elected – and survives Purge night.

“You see this guy who’s now kind of clean-shaven, hair combed, wearing a suit,” Grillo reveals, explaining that Sergeant’s Death

Wish- style Anarchy togs are now a memory. “He is affected deeply by what he sees and experiences, then he goes back to what he was doing before, which was law enforcement.” He chuckles. “He starts out in a suit but it gets rumpled very quickly!”

That won’t come as much of a surprise to those following the franchise. Dreamt up by series director James DeMonaco, 2013’s The

Purge established the ticking time-bomb concept (“it’s always a race against time,” nods Grillo), but sequel The Purge: Anarchy abandoned its single-location scares for something genuinely bruising. And, not unlike HBO’s The Wire, the series excels at gradually pulling the focus on its world, subtly revealing the machinations of this chillingly authoritarian America. According to Grillo, this is one action franchise that couldn’t be more timely.

“We’re really not that far away from some type of a Purge,” he muses. “You listen to Donald Trump talk about building a wall around Mexico, throwing all of the immigrants out of the country... It’s really not that far from what the idea of the Purge was.” As before,

The Purge: Election Year – which Grillo reveals takes a Three Days Of The Condor kind of approach to the scenario – revs reality to a crashing extreme. “The Purge is being used by these rich, white Republican politicians to get rid of the poor,” says Grillo.

“Listen, is it high art?” he adds with a knowing grin. “No. Will it go down in history as an important film in cinema? I don’t know. Is it entertaining and thought-provoking? Yes. It’s a fun 90 minutes!” Well, fun for us – Grillo’s the one who had to endure six weeks of night shooting in Rhode Island. “You start to lose your mind a little bit,” he reveals. “It’s actually a very interesting study in sleep deprivation.” If anybody can handle it, though, this guy can.