Lots of MMA fighters are making the transition to acting, but few have had the breakaway success of Gina Carano. After an acclaimed starring role in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire, Carano appeared in the enormously successful sixth film in the Fast & Furious franchise. This week she returns with In the Blood, her latest starring role, in which she plays a newlywed who fights tropical gangsters and police corruption after her husband (Cam Gigandet) goes missing after a brutal ziplining accident.
We discussed the quirks of working with tropical thriller director John Stockwell (Into the Blue, Turistas), how her discomfort with heights interfered with the ziplining sequences, the strange task of casting a younger version of herself, the future of her all-female action movie with Adi Shankar, the development of the superhero movie Avengelyne, and what she’s looking for in a screenplay.
CraveOnline: I’m so happy to talk to you. I’m a big, big fan of yours. You’re on my list of people whom I really, really don’t want to punch me.
Gina Carano: [Laughs.] You have that kind of list? What have you done in your life to create that list?
It’s mostly just being paranoid. It looks like you’re really good at it. I see you punch people and I go, “No! Not the face!”
Yeah, I think I am good at the punching and kicking thing, in real life and for play.
Have you ever connected in the middle of a shoot, I assume by accident?
No, thank goodness I haven’t. I’m really good about my intentions, so if my intention is to take care of someone, no matter what kind of flailing around everybody else is doing, my intention behind it is to take care of them. I have this weird kind of aggressive feeling where at the same time there’s a lot of care.
It’s got to be tricky because you’ve got to look like you want to him them when you’re not actually trying to. It’s got to be counter-intuitive, I imagine.
Yeah, I don’t know. I think I might have this little sociopath in me where it’s like, “Okay, I can be violent and everybody can still be happy.” [Laughs.] I think that’s the perfect role for me, if can be a sociopath where I can just be violent and everybody can just be happy and enjoying themselves.
Have you told your agent you’re looking for this? I’m sure we could find you something.
No, I think I just said it out loud, so I think I’m going to take it to him.
Well we just published the interview and put it out into the world. So I love the films of John Stockwell, partly because they’re always set in tropical locations and I have this image in my head that the production is a non-stop beach party.
[Laughs.]
Did he promise you the beach party?
Oh gosh, you know I wish it was more like that. No, I’m just kidding! [Laughs.] John is so great. He’s a completely, really intense person and he’s just yelling out at everybody at all times, because he is 100% himself. He’s not somebody who pretends to be anybody else than what he is. He would be screaming at me and screaming at me and at the end of the day he’d be like, “Okay, wow, that was an…” And I was looking at him because I was just getting to know him, I was like, “You were just yelling at me all day and now you want to have a beer? Okay, let’s have a beer.” Once I kind of figured out the way he is I just loved him. He’s an awesome guy.
Were you a fan of his acting back when he was in front of the camera more, like in Christine and Top Gun?
Top Gun. I mean, I didn’t watch a ton of films that he’s in but I’ve watched some the stuff that he’s directed and it’s always been really beautiful. I think it’s because he likes surfing, so he just takes all of his movies where he can be right by the ocean.
Did the screenplay for In the Blood change when you came on board to make it more Gina Carano-ish, or did it already seem suited to you?
The interesting thing is I had this script probably a year and a half, two years ago, and then I got the job for The Fast & The Furious 6. So we were going to film it and then it got pushed to directly afterwards. I really enjoyed the script. I had dreams my whole life about if my sister or brother ever went missing, how could I protect them, how could I find them, and it’s always been this really weird fear of mine. So when I read that I really connected to that part of it. I just found that we weren’t actually going to have any pre-production for it. I was in London, then I flew to Puerto Rico, and the next day I was in a wedding dress meeting my co-star for the first time, and I was like, “Okay, we’re getting married and I’ve never been in a wedding dress before. It’s not how I thought this was going down, but okay.”
Are you glad you didn’t have to fight in that wedding dress? They’re kind of poofy, the wedding dresses.
[Laughs.] I don’t know. I wouldn’t get married like that, I don’t think. It’s a little bit strange.
Characters like Ava are kind of interesting to me because on one hand you’re a normal person thrust into an extraordinary situation, but you also have to have a backstory that explains why you kick so much ass. You have to have a background in ass-kicking.
Right, right. It’s kind of hard to… Nowadays I think scripts are starting to get a better hang of it, at least from what I’m reading, but I’ve had scripts where it’s just like, “Oh, and she used to be this professional fighter.” “Okay, come on guys, I’m not going after the obvious.” In this film I think they did it pretty good. Stephen Lang, I love him to death. Her backstory is, that’s how he loves her. That’s the only way he knows how to love his little girl is to teach her the ways of the world the way he saw it. He gave her that and then I get to use it later on in my life.
Did you have any input about who they cast as a younger Gina Carano? Did they run it by you, and you have a bunch of headshots going, “Oh, she doesn’t have the fire…?”
[Laughs.] Dude, what’s so funny is, I guess this girl is really good, and she ends up being like… She’s taller than me! Which is so funny that when I met her, when she was doing her scene… The reason they liked her was because she was soft and she was able to show emotion. I guess she wasn’t typical really at all. It was kind of an interesting task, but when I met her I was looking up at her and was like, “Are you kidding me?! What?! She’s taller than me!” Then she ends up being the sweetest. I think the little girls ends up being… “little girl,” she’s not a little girl. I think she was the better actress that they were interviewing. I did actually, it was really funny, I was sitting down with the girl and this woman came up to me, she was the mother of one of the girls that had auditioned for it, and she was like, “Um, are you Gina?” “Yeah, we were here for a minute.” “My daughter wanted to be the younger version of you in the movie and so I…” It was so funny.
I want to talk to you about the zipline interrogation sequence. That looks scary as hell. Was that a green screen or were you really dangling over a jungle while filming that?
Thank you. That is such the question I want. Okay, so that’s that’s the first time I’ve ever been ziplining. [Laughs.] And John Stockwell is really funny, he’s got a good sense of humor, and I’ve kind of got a thing with heights. So the first time I’ve ever ziplined was that scene, and this guy is hanging from me, screaming. So we really did that in Puerto Rico. All the actors did it themselves. Even the cameraman, Ishmael. You know that scene where he falls? Cam [Gigandet] did that. There’s stuff that we did on the film that I hope people get to see the behind the scenes, that they have some behind the scenes in there, because that was John Stockwell yelling at me, “Go fifteen more feet out!” and all of the lines flying out of my head because I was so scared to be up there. I have to remember lines and say those lines just petrified, because I’m looking at this guy screaming and I can’t tell if he’s acting or if he’s just really scared. I was really scared!
I could never do that, personally. I do not have ziplining in me.
Oh my gosh, if you go to Puerto Rico I guess the one that we were on is the second tallest in the world. I mean, so the one I was on wasn’t the biggest one, but that Ishmael and Cam got on. So I wanted to see this scene because it’s such an intense scene and they were actually going to do it on this massive zipline. So I went down first to get to the other side to watch them, and oh my gosh, I will never go on that again. It was the scariest thing. I was looking straight in front of me like, “Okay… okay…” I was making eye contact with the zipline worker, like, “Just come get me. Just come get me!” [Laughs.] It’s like a mile long.
It’s ridiculous. I have to ask you, does “The Untitled Adi Shankar Project” have a title yet?
No, it doesn’t, and a lot of people think that’s like the Expendables movie, and I’ve never actually watched an Expendables movie. People just of putting my name in there. Adi Shankar, I love him to death and I’ve met him [for] a couple projects, and I just think that’s the person I definitely want to work with. I think I’m probably going to do a couple films this summer, hopefully, that we’re in negotiations for, and so we might get these done before Adi’s movie.
Is Avengelyne coming close to fruition?
I’m kind of working with Rob Liefeld. There’s a couple of films that are going to go before those, so those are kind of works in progress, if we can meet the right people. We’re going to meetings and meet the right people and find the right writers to attach to them. They’re works in progress. But there’s going to be a couple films this summer that are going to be really good. So we’re trying to get those organized.
Do you know what those are yet?
We’re in negotations, so… One of them that is possible is called The Opium Wars, and then there’s two more that we’re considering. I’m just really looking for a good script and a good director that has a vision for doing something that is not going to have me doing the same thing in every movie. You know, because creatively I don’t want to be doing the exact same thing. I’ve got four experiences that are completely different from each other. I just want to keep pushing towards finding a really good story.
Are you open to non-action movies? Like if someone offered you a romantic comedy…
…I would totally. I would totally be into that. I think that might be a goal in my life, is to figure out… I think that while I do have the ability to be physical, which is good to kind of focus on that too, I mean this is a good time in my life to be physical and I don’t want to ignore that, but it doesn’t really have to be the same type of physicality and I definitely don’t want it to be the same thing over and over, so that makes it interesting looking at scripts.
What other types of physicality would you be interested in besides fights? Would you want to do a dance movie?
There was this really interesting script that came in that was definitely dance, but it was more like a hardcore… not “hardcore,” a really beautiful story. She was a stripper, so that was the physicality, but I don’t know if I would actually do that.
But then there’s some really good soldier stories in scripts that were coming in that were trying the female soldier perspective, and I think that’s really fascinating. I would love to go to a boot camp and really hear the passionate and amazing stories that some of these women have. Because I don’t think that we’ve really heard a ton of it, besides we have that G.I. Jane movie, which I loved by the way, but we haven’t heard a lot of the female soldier perspective. So I think that might be something I’m interested in.
I kind of want to do a romantic comedy. I think there’s a lot of that already in my life that I could use. [Laughs.]
Your life is romantic and comedic, all the time?
Yeah! [Laughs.] Just kind of the circumstances that I’ve had in my life, just being and doing what I’m doing, has gotten a really fun reaction sometimes. So I’ve got this one part of me that’s just completely physical and aggressive, and it’s not always a bad thing. I’m a physical, athletic girl, and at the same time I’m completely 100% emotional and female, and I don’t know, I think sometimes people want to put those two together and just make me into, “Give her a badass character and hope she does that good.” And that’s really not necessarily me. One thing I like about In the Blood is I’m able to smile, I’m able to be a wife, I’m able to connect with the emotional part of me that is who I am in everyday life. It’s just I have this other side to me that happens to be aggressive and physical. I think that people are trying to combine those. There’s really good women out there that play that role very well, I just like the characters going into the emotional ridiculousness that I can be sometimes.
It looked like you were having a lot of fun just being happy movie. A lot of action characters don’t get to do that. They have to be serious all the time.
Yeah, exactly. I got to cry and I got to hopefully have the audience feel how I would feel in that kind of situation. And I still got to be physically. I definitely love exploring this part of life because I try not to put myself in a box. I’m so much more than just physical, so we’ll see what happens with me! [Laughs.]
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and co-host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
