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FILM & TV

Fierce Femme

Femme fatale Michelle Rodriguez talks about the new installment of The Fast and the Furious movies, how she landed her first acting break and what’s next.

Turns out Michelle Rodriguez is not exactly as tough as she seems. During an interview over the phone, she spits out Spanglish with a Dominican accent and cracks several jokes. The feisty actress has a sense of humor, but when it comes to acting she’s dead serious.
Rodriguez appears on the big screen this April in The Fast and the Furious 4, which reunites the first film’s entire original cast—Vin Diesel, Paul Walker, Michelle Rodriguez and Jordana Brewster. Viewers will travel back in time as the movie picks up just before 2006’s The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift.
In this installment, Dom, the fugitive ex-con played by Diesel, and agent Brian O’Conner, played by Walker, team up to confront a shared enemy. Rodriguez returns as Letty. “[Letty] grew up a gear-head who loves cars, and has been racing them since her teens alongside the guy she considers her husband—the love of her life,” she says. Diesel plays her love interest.
Rodriguez says it feels good to be reunited with the original cast, and that the film has a rebellious energy. She declines to reveal much about the plot. “How far will you go for love?,” is all she’d say about the movie’s adventurous storyline.
She did, however, say plenty about her childhood. Playing a tough girl isn’t a stretch for her, really. She was born in Bexar County, Texas, to Puerto Rican and Dominican parents. When she was 9, her family moved to the Dominican Republic, where, she says, she forgot every word of English she knew. Eventually, her family moved back to the U.S., to Jersey City, where she cultivated streets smarts. On one end, “I’d be in the basement with friends playing Dungeons & Dragons. On the other end, I’d walk outside, and the kids I grew up with in grammar school are selling drugs and stealing cars,” she says.
Tip-toeing between both worlds, she says she always maintained an open heart. “You always had to be willing to experience different adventures,” she says. Those adventures, she adds, ranged from trying to get into a club as an underage girl to going to New York to play chess with a bum.
That audacious spirit actually helped her land her very first acting gig. “It was kind of a fluke. I was doing work [as a film extra] for two years because I wanted to see how films got made,” she says. “I was intrigued. I could leave my reality and step into another world.” But, she became tired of the work and got turned off. “I saw people [actors] trying and trying ... talented people not making it.”
One day, Rodriguez saw an ad in the paper for a casting that day for a lead role in the indie film Girlfight, which followed a troubled teen as she trains to become a boxer. Rodriguez arrived one hour late to the casting. “I just made it.”
She acknowledges that the director Karyn Kusama—in her debut film —wasn’t too thrilled at first even talking about the lead role with a girl from Jersey City who didn’t know a thing about acting. “It was her [director’s] first opportunity to break into the film industry,” she says.
But, the producer saw something in Rodriguez she liked. Rodriguez recalls: “The producer looked in my eyes and said I had fire in my eyes. ‘Give her a chance.’ ” They did; she beat out more than 300 other young women for the breakout role that introduced audiences to Rodriguez. “It was a hard decision. I’m glad [the director’s] a gambler and believed in me enough. It’s the kind of energy that makes stars.”
Rodriguez hopes to one day also direct. “Acting is a catalyst toward everything I want to do,” she says. “I’m a storyteller... It takes me a long time to get where I’m going, but I’m going to get there. No one’s gonna stop me.”
Besides The Fast and the Furious 4, Rodriguez will star in James Cameron’s sci-fi film, Avatar, scheduled for a December release.
She’s also co-producing her first movie, Trópico de Sangre, in which she will also star. The historical drama follows the 30-year dictatorship of Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. “It’s about a group of intellectuals who didn’t want to sit down and take it ...”
No word yet if her character, ex-cop Ana Lucia, will be back again this season on Lost. She surprised audiences earlier this year when she made a cameo, appearing in a vision to Hurley, another one of the show’s characters played by Hispanic actor Jorge Garcia.
Rodriguez has a particular affection for characters that are independent, women who can do what they want and get away with it. Strong women.
The young actress, who grew up in a religious family, confesses that loved ones at times have influenced her career decisions. “As a girl coming up in Hollywood, I don’t want to play a slut. You find roles you’d like to express to the world,” she says. “Part of me wants to do crazy things; the other part of me [feels] it’s not the image I want to promote.”