Michelle Rodriguez on how females fit into The Fate of the Furious
SHE’S been with Fast & Furious since the start and Michelle Rodriguez says women will never take the wheel in the films’ “macho” universe.
Michelle Rodriguez is a one-woman riot.
When Rodriguez jumps on the phone to spruik The Fate of the Furious, the blunt-talking, big-laughing actor tells News Corp Australia she’s not up to much — just “causing chaos in New York City”.
It’s easy to imagine the 38-year-old’s no-filter approach to life and business scaring off studio execs and directors, but it has also endeared her to big name auteurs — James Cameron and Robert Rodriguez among them — and seen her forge career box office earnings in excess of $9 billion dollars. (By comparison, her superstar Fast & Furious colleague Dwayne Johnson is sitting at $8.86 billion.)
The Fast & Furious franchise makes up a large chunk of that success. Rodriguez was at the wheel with Vin Diesel and Paul Walker back in 2001 — playing Letty, the car-mad love of Dom’s (Diesel) life — when it was established.
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Sixteen years, five films, one death and one resurrection later, she reckons there’s much to be proud of — especially the series’ reflection of its multiracial, multicoloured audience on screen.
“I feel like we give a nice ticket to the ‘99 per cent’ to be included in Hollywood,” says Rodriguez, the US-born daughter of a Dominican mother and Puerto Rican father. “I hold it special because of that.”
Yet Rodriguez isn’t afraid of pointing out the franchise’s flaws.
For years, at least half of that 99 per cent have been telling Rodriguez they would like something else from Fast & Furious:
“From the female fans that I talk to, the cry is for a little bit more love for the female characters,” she says.
She points out ticket sales for the franchise in the US “pretty much match” the gender split of the population: 51 per cent female, 49 per cent male. So while the studio behind the movies, Universal, has been “a little bit more mindful about the women in their franchise” in recent years, she hopes in future they’ll be “open-minded to adding a couple more girls”.
“Because,” says Rodriguez, “three girls and 20 dudes is a sausage factory.”
The Fate of the Furious, the eighth film in the franchise, does its bit to add some female fuel to the tank: Charlize Theron jumps aboard as the villain, a thoroughly unlikeable cyber terrorist who seduces Dom away from his ‘family’, while Helen Mirren pops up in a role best kept secret.
(Rodriguez was disappointed not to get screen time with Mirren: “I just had to give her a big, fat hug and tell her much I love her,” she says. “Her character in this is classic, dude — super gansta.”)
But even with the two Oscar-winners joining returning ladies Rodriguez, Nathalie Emmanuel and Elsa Pataky, the Fate shoot couldn’t escape a cloud of testosterone-fuelled tension.
During filming, Dwayne Johnson (who plays Hobbs, the federal law man who first chased, then joined the Fast gang) called out Diesel in a veiled Instagram post.
“My female co-stars are always amazing and I love ’em,” Johnson wrote. “My male co-stars however are a different story. Some conduct themselves as stand-up men and true professionals, while others don’t. The ones that don’t are too chicken shit to do anything about it anyway. Candy asses.”
To Rodriguez’s mind, it’s more bluster than franchise-killing feud.
“I think it’s ultimately just a misunderstanding, most likely. I honestly feel like you can’t have a family without some sort of disagreement, ever. It’s impossible,” she laughs. “I don’t know what kinda family you got — you guys agree on everything all the time? Yeah. I think it’s the same here.”
Diesel has suggested that taking Dom down a dark route in The Fate of the Furious, and thus filming most of his scenes with Theron rather than the gang, may have “added a strain” to the production.
Rodriguez agrees there was an altered vibe on set.
“It was definitely a different dynamic because there’s a void of leadership, you know, and it’s hard to fill that with a cop who you were chased after by a couple of movies ago,” she laughs, referring to Johnson’s character.
But she felt the impact in a slightly different way, because Dom going rogue leaves Letty in a bind — still loving and wanting to trust her husband, but confounded by his actions.
“For Letty the hardest thing is the suffering, the maintaining of the faith in a love that keeps proving itself to be something else in its actions. But she has to maintain her faith that the real him is in there somewhere. And that’s tough, you know? It’s tough to play when I’d just rather go crash cars and have fun.”
Who’d have thought actual actingwould be required of Rodriguez in a Fast & Furious movie?
“Exactly!” she exclaims. “Come on guys! I mean Jesus, she’s lost her memory, she’s been killed, come back to life and now this? Gimme a break! I’m kind of over all the suffering. Pick on another character.”
From day one of her movie career — playing a barrier-busting boxer in 2000’s Girlfight — Rodriguez has specialised in action and female empowerment. The Fast and the Furious was first to nab her after that powerful breakout, despite the fact she didn’t have a driver’s licence at the time.
She then went on to kick zombie butt with Milla Jovovich in the Resident Evil franchise, stop bad guys in their tracks in S.W.A.T., pilot to new worlds in Avatar and seek cross-border vengeance in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete and Machete Kills.
But in none of those films did Rodriguez do anything like she does in her new action thriller The Assignment , which opened in limited cinemas in the US last Friday.
In the film, Rodriguez plays a man. A male assassin who, after picking off the wrong victim, unknowingly undergoes gender reassignment surgery and wakes up a woman.
That’s the unusual revenge exacted by Sigourney Weaver’s “sociopath doctor” — trapping the ‘he’ in a ‘she’ body.
After years of working in the Fast & Furious sausage factory, what was it like for Rodriguez to have a sausage herself?
The actor howls with laughter.
“Let me tell you, honey, you never feel more like a woman than when you play a man. It was nuts.
“I thought it would be easy because I’m a tomboy and I’m assertive and I got a low-toned voice ... Bullsshit! Every time I lifted my hands to scratch my beard, you could see my skinny little wrists and fingers. I’m like, ‘Dammit, I’m such a girl!’ The daintiest little wrists, the most feminine ass, the most feminine back ...
“I had a blast though, it was fun.”
Rodriguez will next be seen in Alita: Battle Angel, the sci-fi passion project written by Cameron and directed by the other Rodriguez. She’s also joining a great cast in Steve McQueen’s Widows, about a group of spouses who finish the job after their criminal husbands are killed during a robbery.
And that may have to be where she gets her kicks for now, because as much as Rodriguez has no intention of hitting the brakes on Fast & Furious — and there are two more movies scheduled for release in the next four years — she knows Letty’s role will always be limited.
“It feels so macho to me, there’s really no room to do anything independently of the guys, you know? I just don’t really see there any room for growth and evolution for Letty specifically, just because she’s so closely tied to the alpha male in the project and I just don’t see them deviating from the format of macho, testosterone-driven stuff.
“You know, it’s their franchise, it’s not mine. I’m just hanging along for the ride. So I just really don’t ... care, actually, where it goes. To be quite honest.”
She laughs.
“I just want it to be good and I want it to succeed.”
THE FATE OF THE FURIOUS IS NOW SHOWING
Originally published as Michelle Rodriguez on how females fit into The Fate of the Furious
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