BRAVE HEART
Chicago-born KIELE SANCHEZ might be running for her life in ‘The Purge: Anarchy’ but in reality, she’s totally fearless
ifJennifer Lawrence is leading the charge for arrow-slinging action heroines and Kate Hudson carries the torch for rom-com leading ladies, then Kiele Sanchez represents a much-needed challenge for Hollywood directors: an actress who defies labeling. “I never want to be put in a box,” Sanchez says. “I did a couple of action movies, but then I did comedy — I’m not known for any one thing.” The 37-year-old Chicago native has deliberately selected a series of eclectic roles over the past 15 years to prove that she can do it all — and she’s already done most of it: She starred in major projects like ABC’s 2003 sitcom “Married to the Kellys” as Breckin Meyer’s Midwestern housewife; in 2006, she joined ABC’s cult hit “Lost” as manipulative thief Nikki Fernandez; in 2010 she played working mom Callie Cargill in “The Glades”; and on the big screen, she became a tourist who runs afoul of homicidal sociopaths in 2009’s psychological thriller “The Perfect Getaway.”
Sanchez’s wide-ranging resume — and her ability to disappear entirely into her characters — is likely why she’s not immediately identifiable off-screen. “It’s really strange,” she laughs. “In ‘ The Perfect Getaway’ I had an accent, so I don’t think people realize that it’s me. Even when I was doing press for that movie, [reporters] were like, ‘ Wait … I thought you had an accent.’ I was like, ‘Um, no.’ ”
Now the Jill-of-all-trades is bringing her indefinable appeal to yet another genre: horror. She’s starring in “The Purge: Anarchy,” the sequel to 2013’s ultraprofitable Ethan Hawke flick “The Purge.” Set in the very near future, the film follows American life under a new policy called the “The Purge,” a 12-hour period each year when all crime (including murder) is legal. Sanchez plays Liz, who, alongside her husband (played by Sanchez’s real-life husband, Evanston native and former Splash cover star Zach Gilford, whom she wed in 2012), gets stuck outside during the annual crime spree. Targeted by masked marauders, the couple must run — and fight — for their lives, all while coping with their crumbling marriage. “Basically 98 percent of my job on this movie was running around being scared,” Sanchez says.
But she also succeeds in doing what she does best: breaking the mold. While many actresses become one-dimensional in horror flicks, playing terrified for an hour and a half, Sanchez managed to find other motivations for her character. “One of the hardest things to do when you’re in a movie like this is to make sure that you’re taking every chance you can to bring an emotion other than ‘scared’ into the scene,” she says. “You have to really mine those opportunities.”
Sharing the screen with her husband presented a whole new set of challenges — after all, they spent much of their time together pretending to be getting divorced. “It was weird — we didn’t kiss goodbye in the morning,” she says. “When we were at home, we were basically in our own spaces. We didn’t talk a whole lot — there were no stories for us to talk about [after spending all day together].” But according to Sanchez, having a solid marriage just made playing a couple on the rocks that much simpler: “We have so much love between us that it was easy to understand how sad it would be if it didn’t work out.”
The couple, who met in 2010 in Chicago while filming the ABC pilot “The Matadors,” have seen their careers catch fire almost in unison: Gilford landed “Friday Night Lights” in 2006, the same year Sanchez was cast in “Lost.” For Sanchez, it was a long-awaited big break. “[I’ve always been] drawn to living in other people’s skin and playing make-believe for a living,” says the actress, who began acting as a child as a way to get over stage fright. “When I was a little girl, I wanted to be a spy. For some reason I thought that was more attainable than being an actress. Where I grew up, no parents around me were actors. It didn’t even seem like something normal people could do. But a spy …”
Fortunately espionage didn’t pan out for the actress — but that doesn’t mean she’s not as fearless as 007. Whether it’s diving into acting at a young age without a life raft or taking nonconformist roles, Sanchez says she doesn’t fear challenges: “I don’t allow myself to see the obstacles, so therefore they’re not there.”
She’s equally intrepid in her personal life — and sometimes that means laying down the law with her movie-star husband. “We made a deal before we got married,” she explains. “He likes to wear sweatpants as soon as we get into the house. He also likes to eat. And he farts. A lot. So I said, ‘Listen, you can have two of those things: You can wear sweats and fart but not in my presence, you can get fat and wear sweatpants and not fart, or you can get fat and fart, but not wear sweatpants. He’s chosen that he’s not going to get fat.” She laughs and adds, “I still feel like I’m getting the short end of the stick, but I’ll take it.” The Chicago power couple is now based in LA, but they come back home at least twice a year — and with so many family members in town, Sanchez and Gilford have found a unique way to divide their time. “No matter how much time we give to each of them, they’ve all decided that it’s not enough. So when we come in town, we rent a place in Humboldt Park or Logan Square and we just make everyone come to us,” she laughs. And the couple isn’t ruling out a move to our fair city. “We dream about coming back all the time,” Sanchez says. “Maybe we’ll be like [retirees] where we fly away for the winters and just come back for the summer.” With her off-screen marriage on solid footing, Sanchez is focusing on continuing to make bold career choices. “I try to choose things that are different from the last thing I did,” she says. To that end, she’ll rejoin “The Purge: Anarchy” costar Frank Grillo in DirecTV’s drama “Kingdom,” an hourlong family drama set in the world of mixed martial arts, which will premiere this October. Sanchez and Grillo both signed on while they were filming “The Purge,” but this particular role won’t see Sanchez running scared. “[My character Lisa] is a strong, complicated, interesting woman,” she says.
Switching from terrified girl-on-the-run to strong, independent woman is exactly what Sanchez loves to do. “My manager recently told me, ‘ You’re not the go-to girl for anything,’ ” Sanchez says. Those are words that would typically strike fear into the heart of any rising star, but Sanchez is unfazed. “Not letting myself become the comedic girl or the action hero has probably gotten in my way at times, but my dream has always been to take the most diverse, eclectic [roles available]. I would be bored out of my mind just collecting checks or doing a job where I don’t really think — there’s no limit to what I can do.”