A woman of action: F9 star Jordana Brewster and her rise with the hit franchise
The ‘rev head’ Fast & Furious movies have made more than $5bn, and one of the stars from the original is a driving force in F9.
It seems astounding that when Jordana Brewster was cast as Vin Diesel’s rev head sister Mia in the original The Fast and the Furious movie, she couldn’t drive. This is a fact the raven-haired beauty had let slip in an interview I conducted with her at the 2001 Deauville Film Festival – shortly after the release of the first Fast and Furious film, which was inspired by the world of illegal street racing.
Two decades later, Brewster, now aged 41, is talking up Fast & Furious 9 – or F9 – which releases in the US and Australia this month, reminiscing about that very time in Deauville with co-stars Vin Diesel, Paul Walker and Michelle Rodriguez, before anyone knew just what a juggernaut the series would be.
“It wasn’t just us but Heath Ledger was there and also Tara Reid. It was such a strange moment in history for us,” says Brewster over Zoom from Los Angeles.
Indeed, the first The Fast and the Furious, directed by Rob Cohen had released in the US to enormous success.
“It made $40m or something insane the first weekend and it was just like, wow. It was quite the ride. Now we’re coming on to 20 years, which is crazy.”
More crazy is that eight films later the franchise’s total takings have been a reported $US3.9bn ($5.07bn). Some of Hollywood’s biggest stars have appeared in supporting roles – Charlize Theron returns for the second time in F9 as does Helen Mirren as criminal matriarch Magdalene Queenie Shaw, driving a $350,000 supercar through the streets of London with Diesel riding shotgun.
The Oscar winner reportedly “begged” for the role, before joining the franchise in Fast 8.
Brewster, who has appeared in five of the Fast films, had been working as a model when it all began and admits she was fairly new to acting. “I was so green, so new.”
She was also determined to continue with her degree in English literature at Yale (her grandfather had been the university’s president for a time).
“When I was working on the first film I was kind of the nerd,” she recalls. “When everyone else went out I would just go back to my hotel room and watch Big Brother, which was very popular at the time and I would have dinner on my own, while studying and reading books. I felt like a bit of an outsider because I wasn’t quite in Hollywood. I sort of had one foot in the door and one foot out and that’s how I’ve always felt most comfortable. I think that was also a defence mechanism in a way.
“When I was at school, I could always say, ‘Well, I’m an actor’, and then when I was acting in Hollywood, I could say, ‘Well, I’m a student at Yale’. While it made me a bit of a fish out of water on campus, my studies have been helpful because I can more easily differentiate between good and poor material. It might seem that the two wouldn’t go together, but somehow they do.”
Brewster says her confidence has greatly improved over the years. “I have two sons, I’ve gotten a divorce (from producer Andrew Form, who she met on the set of 2006 movie The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) and I’ve fallen in love again. I think there’s this new-found sense of not really caring what people think.
During our interview, Brewster expresses strong admiration for her co-star Rodriguez – which strikes as particularly profound given rumours of a feud between Diesel and Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, a Fast and Furious stalwart who does not appear in F9.
“I want to go for what I want. That’s given me the sense of outspokenness that I’ve always admired in someone like Michelle,” Brewster says.
“Michelle has always been very comfortable in her own skin but I’ve always held back and now I’m tired of holding back, so I don’t any more.”
She says that F9, directed and co-written by Justin Lin, who returns after directing her in previous Fast movies, as well as Annapolis (where she co-starred with another Fast alumni Tyrese Gibson), takes note of Me#Too so the women share much more of the action.
Brewster appears in a fierce hand-to-hand Tokyo fight scene with Rodriguez’s Letty and newcomer Elle, played by New Zealand-born Anna Sawai.
Brewster commends Rodriguez, now a power player in the franchise, for insisting on highlighting Mia and Letty’s story since the characters never had a scene together. “I think it’s wonderful that now we get to explore their relationship. What was more interesting was being part of the writing process and figuring out how to highlight our relationship.
“I had to work really hard on the action (she took taekwondo lessons to prepare) and Michelle showed up and learned the choreography within a day and made it look really easy,” she chuckles. “That’s just very Michelle.”
Like all the Fast films, F9 has its share of street racing and heists. It also delves into the motivations and family background of Diesel’s ever stoic Dom, as his long lost younger brother Jakob (John Cena) arrives on the scene as a kind of villain and nemesis.
The action takes place around the world, and – as surely as night follows day – includes numerous car chases, as Dom’s team tries to prevent the baddies, including Theron’s Cipher and Jakob, from wreaking destruction with a device that would allow them to control all the world’s computers and advanced weapons systems.
Ultimately Mia becomes a kind of peacemaker between her brothers.
When I ask how it has been working with a cast headed by such big men, noting how Diesel was compared to Arnold Schwarzenegger at the time of our initial interview, Brewster says that in the end they are all like family.
“After you work with these guys for 20 years they’re not larger than life any more,” she replies affectionately.
“It’s sort of a wise comparison between Vin and Arnold Schwarzenegger because both had a lot of ambition, a lot of foresight. I think they both took people by surprise. A lot of people aren’t aware of how much Vin has to do with the franchise and with the direction it’s going in and I’m just amazed by his ability to call things into fruition.
“He was a big part of my character coming back and would plant these little seeds along the way.”
After skipping the remaining films in the original trilogy, Brewster returned for the fourth Fast & Furious in 2009, when the series transitioned towards heist and spying. She was very much a part of the action in Fast Five as Mia teamed with Dom and Walker’s Brian in planning a heist to steal a fortune from a corrupt businessman in Brazil.
She then only had smaller roles in the sixth and seventh instalments as she had a commitment to work on the revamped version of Dallas. “It was this torturous thing for me, where I knew everyone was shooting. I begged Justin to be patient with me because I wasn’t able to travel to England to shoot.
“I became a smaller character in the sixth film and then, needless to say, the seventh was incredibly difficult to shoot because the intention was for me to film with Paul. And then because of the circumstances, I didn’t shoot with him, so that was gut-wrenching.”
Walker had died half-way through filming at the age of 40 in a single-vehicle collision where he was a passenger. Walker – whose death shocked Hollywood – was beloved of fans and had been the first actor to sign on to the franchise, as undercover cop Brian O’Connor. The accident, it should be said, had nothing to do with the films – he had attended a charity event for Reach Out Worldwide, his organisation aimed at helping areas after natural disasters.
Ultimately the film, directed by Australia’s James Wan, had to be rewritten and it became the biggest box office earner in the lucrative franchise.
At the end Mia had been all loved up and settled down with Brian and their two children in a secluded house in the Canary Islands, which became the reason for Walker’s exit.
“Instead we shot with Paul’s brother and another actor with a similar physicality,” Brewster recalls.
“I miss Paul dearly. Working with him was incredibly easy. I think we had magnificent chemistry because he was such an open, wonderful soul.”
Brewster is the daughter of Brazilian model Maria Joao and American investment banker Alden Brewster. She was born in Panama and then lived in London, Rio and ultimately moved to New York at the age of 10.
Her exotic looks lend her a versatility in terms of casting. “I’m quite lucky, I’m a bit of a chameleon,” she concedes.
She is also incredibly well-preserved and admits to receiving her beauty tips from her mum.
“She said, ‘Get your beauty sleep and take your make-up off before’. She was a pain in my butt but she taught me well.”
Acting consistently over the years, Brewster had her first break starring in Robert Rodriguez’s 1998 film The Faculty and the soap As the World Turns.
I’d also met her in 2000 on the set of The Invisible Circus when she admitted to liking the down-to-earth attitude of her co-star Cameron Diaz, who has since given acting away.
Not so Brewster, who has found a new gear and is acting more than ever. She had appeared as Clayne Crawford’s shrink in the highly addictive Lethal Weapons television series and now has re-teamed with the actor (who was outstanding in the Mel Gibson role) for a feature film, The Integrity of Joseph Chambers, directed by Robert Machoian. Crawford and Machoian had collaborated on The Killing of Two Lovers, one of the standouts at the 2020 Sundance and Melbourne Film Festivals and now they have invited Brewster into their fold. “I just did a little bit of ADR (audio re-recording) and I’m really excited to see it. They’re both pretty much geniuses.”
Brewster will also most likely be in the final two Fast instalments, which will wrap up the main series.
Five sequels later, much has changed. She has a car and a licence for one thing. “I don’t like cars that are close to the road, I like driving a Range Rover in which I feel really secure. But I’m also very impatient, I get tickets often.
“Everyone’s always asking me, when you get pulled over can’t you just say you’re in Fast and Furious? But I never, ever do. I just got a speeding ticket two weeks ago and the cop was like, ‘Five miles over, 10 miles over, but 15?’ I said, ‘I’m sorry, sir. I’m rushing to pick up my son’. I couldn’t talk my way out of the ticket. In fact I was so angry with myself that I didn’t ask the officer if I could record us because it would have been a fun gag.”
Fast & Furious 9 releases in cinemas on June 17