Michelle Rodriguez on Dungeons & Dragons, Fast & Furious and how refusing ‘girlfriend’ roles almost jeopardised her career
Michelle Rodriguez wants to make it absolutely clear: she is no token female when it comes to acting roles. In fact, there was a time the Fast & Furious franchise star’s insistence could have jeopardised her career.
Hollywood star Michelle Rodriguez “doesn’t do the sexy thing”. In fact, she has spent her career avoiding so-called girlfriend roles in favour of action films, where she feels she can be taken seriously as an actor.
“When you’re busy shooting guns, nobody’s got time to grab your ass,” the 44-year-old actor tells Review down the phone from Los Angeles. The action genre, she adds, has in her career been the only one “where I could be free, without being an object of someone’s ownership”.
“It’s either you play somebody’s girlfriend and cry because the guy left you, then spend the whole movie getting him back, or you do an action movie, you kick ass, take names, and call it a day,” she says. “I’ll take the action, please.”
The actor, who made her name in the Fast and Furious franchise, and as a no-nonsense survivor of a plane crash in the long-running TV mystery Lost, has a fierce reputation in the industry for her uncompromising values and advocacy for feminism. She is, it would seem, the epitome of a cool, modern, convention-flouting woman.
So her next revelation comes a surprise.
“I have the deepest, most profound respect for geeks around the world because I am one,” she says. The comment isn’t totally out of the blue. Rodriguez will star in upcoming film Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves, from writer-director duo John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein, as a thief and a barbarian in an ensemble cast made up of Hugh Grant, Chris Pine, Regé-Jean Page and Justice Smith. But Michelle Rodriguez a geek?
In the 1990s, when Rodriguez was growing up “wild, crazy Jersey City”, she spent her days rollerblading into New York, tearing up the Lower East Side “like Angelina Jolie, in Hackers”. It was at underground reggae parties that she first heard hip-hop; she remembers that the kids who sold drugs were the ones who had the money and also controlled the music.
It was during her teenage years that Rodriguez embraced her inner geek. She devoured comic books, hoarded collectable Marvel cards and hid out with her nerdiest friends, making up Dungeons & Dragons campaigns. “Years of my teenage life was spent hanging out in the basement with my geek friends, playing D & D, trying to figure out who I wanted to be,” she says.
Dungeons and Dragons, the Hasbro fantasy role-playing boardgame, was created 49 years ago. It revolves around an exploring party that embarks on elaborate quests in various fantasy worlds. A D&D session typically lasts three hours, and that’s just one chapter of a campaign that can last for months. A referee, known as the Dungeon Master, oversees the game, which has lit up the imagination of players, yet has never had a decent film adaptation despite its long ties to cinema. There was Elliot’s older brother barring him from a D & D campaign in Steven Spielberg’s ET, and the outcast kids in Stranger Things, finding kinship in their D&D society.
During the pandemic, the game, including its various video game iterations, which was once banished to the geek underground, has become more popular than ever — celebrities like Anderson Cooper, Aubrey Plaza, Vin Diesel and Vince Vaughn are all noted fans. The game is estimated to have more than 50 million players worldwide.
That built-in fanbase will no doubt be a boon for the film, but it brings with it high stakes. Rodriguez is all too aware of that reality, and tells Review that she “wouldn’t have touched the movie with a 10-foot pole” if she didn’t think it was a risk worth taking.
She reviles studios that “butcher” beloved franchises with the idea they can make an easy dollar out of dedicated fans. “It’s a problem when there’s no respect for the story, or for the years of enjoyment that fans have gained from something, when it’s just chasing money,” Rodriguez says.
She says that it’s impossible to feel “that kind of energy” from directors Goldstein and Daley – “Come on, It’s the dude from Freaks and Geeks!” She is talking about Daley, who before pivoting to directing played the nerdy freshman Sam Weir in Judd Apatow’s cult teen series, which aired in 1999.
It was Freaks and Geeks that introduced Daley to the game. “I had known peripherally about it, so I decided, being the young method actor that I was, to play a campaign with the fellow cast members and immediately I fell in love with the world,” he said during a panel at San Diego Comic-Con.
Rodriguez first gained Hollywood’s attention as the formidable Lenny Ortiz in the 2001 action film The Fast and the Furious, a gig she landed after her co-star, Vin Diesel, saw her in the low-budget Sundance winner, Girlfight. Rodriguez was a high-school dropout with no formal acting training when she beat 300 girls for her role as a ruthless young woman who demands to be taken seriously as a boxer in the Karyn Kusama-directed film – a performance that won her the best debut prize at the 2000 independent Spirit Awards.
Over the years, Rodriguez has become a dominating presence in action franchises. She played a tough-as-nails special ops member in Resident Evil (which director James Cameron called a “guilty pleasure” and praised her “feral” performance); a badass, one-eyed leader of an immigrant aid movie in Robert Rodriguez’s (no relation) Spy Kids spin-off, Machete; and a combat pilot in Avatar. She often pushes her body to the extremes for roles – for Girlfight, she trained as a boxer, and for Dungeons & Dragons she gained 4kg of muscle.
“I haven’t been able to get it off, don’t remind me,” she says, laughing. The actor says she is attracted to roles that demand a lot of her physically, rather than intellectually. She’s not interested in “jousting as a thespian”.
“I like to move. I’ve never been attracted to a role where I have to dig deep into my suffering,” she says. “If you grew up where I grew up, we get enough of that in real life. If we make movies, we do that to escape.”
When Rodriguez took on the role of Letty in The Fast and the Furious, she demanded the character go through a rewrite – she hated that she was portrayed as a trophy girlfriend.
It was a courageous stance for her to take so early into her career and one she credits both to her Jersey street smarts and, oddly, her time as a Jehovah's’s Witness. Though she “doesn’t have a religious bone in my body anymore”, she says it instilled a foundation of values in her that “eliminate money and power as desirable – all in the name of respect and integrity’’.
“My value system was always a little different,” she says. “In my 20s, everyone was looking for more legitimacy within the industry – more power, more access. Me, I wanted integrity.”
Rodriguez, who was born in Texas, and whose parents are from the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, says that in the early 2000s, when she got her start, any other actors that “looked like me” were limited to hypersexualised, exoticised roles. “I was like, ‘This can’t be right’,” she says. To her, there are three kinds of women: The Mother, “who will sacrifice herself in the name of love for her children”; Cleopatra “Your Angelina Jolie, or your Beyonce – hypersexualised, but a queen who knows how to generate wealth, power and success from sex,”; and The Warrior Princess, with which she identifies. “The Warrior Princess is who she is, and will bite your head off if you try to challenge it. I’ve been her my entire career, and I’ve found myself a niche,” she says.
Rodriguez admits, however, that her refusal to take on “girlfriend” roles almost sent her bankrupt. “It was rough man, it wasn’t easy,” she says.
In June 2017, Rodriguez made headlines over an Instagram post in which she threatened to quit Fast and the Furious unless the studio “showed love to the women”. At the time, the franchise had never had a female director or screenwriter.
After decades of rewriting her character’s lines, she was tired. “It’s not my job. I don’t get paid for it. Most of those one-liners that came out of my mouth in the Fast and Furious series were written by me,” she says. She signed on to reprise her role for Justin Lin’s F9, after securing an agreement to have a female screenwriter join the production.
Rodriguez says there’s a problem with male screenwriters who think that, because they are storytellers, they understand the female experience. “You can’t have a man who had a cock between his legs tell the story of a woman and how she would be feeling. It’s impossible; I don’t care how good you are,” she says.
“Everything we know about being a woman has been written by men. What it is to be a woman is yet to be told. We’re discovering it at the moment. We’re living in one of the most unprecedented times in the history of femininity, and I’m excited to see what women conjure up after they get away from the false identity handed to them by men.”
When she was doing the media rounds for Girlfight in 2000, the then 22-year-old told reporters that she had aspirations to be a writer. When asked if this is still the case, a shyness takes over.
“I’m the biggest chicken shit,” she says. “I’ve been in this industry for 20 years, and I’m not afraid to rewrite my own stuff in a movie, when it needs a feminine touch, but writing is scary. I respect it. If you want to talk about my biggest fear, first I would say sharks, because it’s the one thing left that I haven’t fought, and the next would be writing.”
Is it actually the writing she is afraid of or is it the revealing of her work to other people? She thinks it’s the latter.
“The core of the fear is a deep-down fear of rejection,” she says.
“I’ll jump off a plane when I’m scared of heights. I’ll shoot a 50-calibre gun. I’ll shoot assault rifles off of a helicopter, but I have a hard time just sitting down and doing the work. “You’ve been my therapy session for the day. Thank you.”
Dungeons and Dragons is in cinemas nationally from March 31
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