Michelle Rodriguez tackles ‘Furious’ feelings
You’ve stuck with the big lug nut through his early criminal schemes, coming back from the dead, losing your memory and finally regaining it. Now, on your long-delayed Cuban honeymoon, he hooks up with some blond-braided brainiac cyberterrorist.
What do you do? If you’re Letty Ortiz Toretto, you keep the faith.
“I’m beyond the jealousy stage,” laughs Michelle Rodriguez, who’s played Letty to Vin Diesel’s Dominic Toretto in “The Fast and the Furious” franchise since the beginning and now copes with his seeming betrayal in the eighth chapter, “The Fate of the Furious.” “There’s some point when you’ve known a guy for so long that you just know where that dude’s heart is, even if everybody else doesn’t. There’s no insecurity in that kind of relationship, people who love each other so much that it’s like, ‘Why is he making out with this chick’ more than, ‘Ooh, I’m gonna get her!’ “
Still, Letty goes through a lot of feelings in the new movie, something actionloving Rodriguez didn’t exactly appreciate.
“It was rough, man,” she admits. “I don’t like going there. I just want to blow
things up and have fun, race cars and stuff. This was, like, miserable for me. It’s tough to portray because it’s an action film, it’s not a drama, but this is dramatic as a storyline can get. How do you cram all of it into the five or 10 minutes that you get for drama in an action film? But I think the director, F. Gary Gray, did what he could and pulled it off.”
The 38-year-old Rodriguez, who got her start portraying an aspiring boxer in the 2000 indie hit “Girlfight,” faced an even bigger acting challenge in another movie that’s just been released, Walter Hill’s “The Assignment.” In that controversial crime thriller, she plays a hit man — yes, a hit MAN — who gets sexually reassigned into a woman by Sigourney Weaver’s vengeful surgeon, but still thinks like a male.
Rodriguez donned a fake beard and other appendages for the first part of that movie, which included a full frontal “nude” scene. While she took on the project, which has been widely criticized for its pulpy portrayal of transgendering as a kind of punishment, because she was hungry for an insane challenge, the actress was surprised by what she discovered playing a man.
“I never felt more like a woman,” the tough gal reveals. “There are just so many things about me that are truly feminine. My hands, I couldn’t gain the weight to be more of a macho dude, so I had to play the skinny, hairy guy, and I just realized how hairless and feminine I am, how dainty my wrists are. I just felt really girly playing a guy! I loved it because it made me realize being a tomboy doesn’t justify manhood at all.”
Rodriguez is also proud of experiencing Smurfhood. She can also be heard as the voice of SmurfStorm in the little blue folks’ new animated movie, “The Lost Village.”
“For me, it’s like that ageold mythological story of the Amazons,” she says. “In the franchise, there’s only ever been one Smurf girl, Smurfette, and she’s not even a real Smurf. So this whole story is about the introduction of the Smurfs to the real females, an entire village of just chicks. I think it’s awesome!”
Sounds like it, especially when the men in your movie life are acting so weird.