Michelle Rodriguez: Nothing Added

There are still guys who question their masculinity because they were beaten up by an adolescent named Michelle Rodriguez nearly two decades ago. To make matters worse, she was wearing a dress at the time. But, hey, don’t feel too badly about that; the Girlfight star is one hard-hitting young woman. She was pleasant with us, however, answering questions and proving herself at emotional/intellectual depth. My guess is that she would be tougher in a debate than she would be in the ring.

Regardless, Michelle delivers a hard dose of reality to the matter at hand. She’ll fight nighttime dragons and play fictitious characters on screen, but face-to-face, it’s pure reality. That’s all fine with us, except that her favorite makeup is ChapStick, which presented a unique challenge to our makeup department, since she declined to put anything on her skin for the photos accompanying this article. Her look, her laugh, her voice, her words—it’s there without apology or anything to cover it up. Maybe it’s because she was brought up in the Dominican Republic, where she watched abject poverty entwine itself around the latticework of her balcony, threatening to topple her world. Maybe it’s because she was raised to stand against rules that made no sense to her or her parents. Maybe she’s the latest snowflake to be added the infinite patterns that fall from the heavens, composing that complex quilt known as individuality.

There was no hesitation or warm-up period either. She walked into the photo studio and, boom! the interview was on. Accompanying her were her Romanian cat, Precious, and her friend’s dog, Buster. Neither of them expressed strong opinions on anything.

Risen Magazine: Do you think that free speech should just be an open box; say whatever you want?
Michelle Rodriguez: I think it already is that way. I’ve seen tons of documentaries on White Power. Do I think that should exist? Maybe I don’t agree with what they do. Suppressing only creates a bottled feeling that will come out in other ways. I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, but when my grandmother left, I went crazy. I did everything I wasn’t allowed to do. I was careful doin’ it, cuz I still feared Him in some way, shape or form. I loved God. It’s like, What’s the fun of doing it now? All girl schools or all boy schools…Why do you think they do the crazy stuff they do? Suppression. I’m not down with suppression, man.

RM: People are being forced to do a lot of things they don’t want to do.
MR: There are monks burning every day, man, women getting their clitorises cut off, getting rocked to death for looking at other guys. There are lots of things that we’re told not to do. In my eyes, everybody’s journey is their own. They have to learn on their own. Forcing them is not gonna do it. I know that when my parents told me I couldn’t go to a party, it made me want to go 10 times more. When they told me I was allowed to go, I didn’t want to. That’s how things work with rebellious people.

RM: What led you to theater arts?
MR: The ability to communicate with the masses. I sure as hell don’t know what I want to say to them, though.

RM: You’re doing a lot of writing. Are you more interested in writing than acting?
MR: Hell yeah. But I learned that writers are not respected. I was an extra in a Spike Lee movie and I saw some crazy stuff, the way actors got treated and I thought, Oh, that’s not the way to go either. I saw the producers and realized that they were the powerful ones. I started as an actress and I’m gonna work my way up. It’s all about the team, man. Right now I have about five people by my side, where I could put a million dollars on the table and they wouldn’t touch it. I want honest, good people around me. I’ve stopped makin’ fun of people, bein’ mean in bars. If you want to attract good energy, you’ve got to do that. I learned that last year. [Laughs] I guess I’m a slow learner. [Laughs]

RM: Are you a voracious reader?
MR: I read fractions of things, cuz I’m interested. I’ve got this ADD thing going on.

RM: ADD might be a different way to think, not an incorrect way to think.
MR: There is no incorrect in my book.

RM: A lot of American Indians looked at people we call abnormal and even schizophrenics as visionaries.
MR: Heck yeah. Most of the geniuses in the world were total kooks. Now we look at these guys like geniuses. From my view, whenever something new is introduced and I don’t understand it, I’m just gonna shut up.

RM: Are acting and writing an attempt to escape pain, to make the world the way you want to make it?
MR: No, not at all. To me it’s like I’m a walking Nerf. I’m here to feel. Nothing that comes out of me is original. I am everything I have experienced since I was a baby. The point is, it’s how you regurgitate, what your throwup looks like. [Laughs]

RM: Kind of a Jackson Pollock way to see things.
MR: Everything’s an opinion, even things that are square. Someone can look at a mathematic equation and see a shape or a color. It’s how you look at it. People are so busy trying to reinterpret everything and
they’re probably saying the same thing the whole time.

RM: You don’t think that there’s absolute truth then?
MR: I’m sure there’s truth to individuals, but that’s just how I feel. My opinion. [Laughs]

RM: How would you feel if you were in a plane and the pilot’s opinion was that to get to Hawaii from Los Angeles, you went east instead of west?
MR: I’d be like, I don’t know anything about flying planes, brother. It’s all in your hands, but if we landed and were in the wrong place, I’d think, I had a feeling…[Laughs]

RM: Are you more interested in fame or influence?
MR: For me, fame’s a tool to communicate. I don’t look at it like a goal. As far as influence goes, if it happens, that’s great. The journey there, gaining the fame is hard. I’ll tell you right now there’s gonna be a lot of good and bad involved in that. I think that you have to do some negative things to do some positive things. You can’t always be light; even light attracts darkness. Finding that fine line between fame and influence, positive influence is gonna be the big battle in my career and my life.

RM: Aren’t you recognized a lot?
MR: Again I look at that as a tool. When a woman of 40 walks up to me, Spanish, and she says, You make me strong; keep it up, or a young girl comes up and says, I like your style that’s hot to me. It makes me realize that all these times when I’m arguing with directors and people think I’m hard to work with, I’m doin’ the right thing. At the end of the day I can’t sit there and think, You know what? It’s just a job. I can’t, no. All you gotta do to be famous is make out with a hot Hollywood actor on screen and make it hot. I can do that. I don’t think I’m that bad in bed! [Laughs] That’s easy. The formula is very simple. My road’s gonna be kind of hard then. I fear it. I fear goin’ broke. I fear a lot of stuff.

RM: Does being a thinker intimidate guys?
MR: A lot of European men like it.

RM: Do you ever dumb it down?
MR: I’m not into that.

RM: What was your upbringing?
MR: Imagine having Jehovah’s Witness parents telling you that everything you’re being taught in school is a bunch of hob squash, which most of the time it was. My grandmother would tell me that I couldn’t stand there and praise the American flag, or I couldn’t celebrate Halloween and I couldn’t watch Disney movies, cuz of the negative black magic involved. And all these things that I wasn’t allowed to do. In school, I was taught that when the Pilgrims came, they were happy that the Indians gave ‘em food. My grandparents taught me that they were slaughtered by a bunch of English Pilgrims.

RM: What was the heritage of your grandparents?
MR: Puerto Rican, Dominican. Then my dad’s side was like the information man, the kind of man that’s like, Knowledge is power. On the one hand I had my grandmother shielding me. I call that “the fetus,” that type of religion that has too many rules. Then you have your father kind of telling you there’s a world out there, go educate yourself. Yourself! Don’t let them educate you. Revolutionary kind of guy, you know? So, it was like I was brought up a mixture of…I was born in Texas; I lived there ‘til I was nine. From there I moved to Dominican Republic. When I was 12, I moved to Jersey City where I spent the rest of my growing up years, playing like Dungeons & Dragons with geeks, riding around on rollerblades and hanging out with a bunch of drug dealers on the corner. [Laughs] I was exposed to a lot of things.

RM: Did you ever go door to door as a Jehovah’s Witness?
MR: Yes. I was afraid that I’d see somebody from school and they were gonna really get pissed off that I knocked on their door on a Saturday at nine o’clock in the morning. I was scared that the next door I knocked on would be a friend from school and I’d have to get into yet another fight. I got into lots of fights in school. I was such a tomboy and my grandmother would dress me in these dresses. Guys would pick on me about my fake fur coat. I’m in a public school, mind you.Why am I wearing a dress? [Laughs] I was the only one dressed like it was a special event at school, every day. It was awful and I had to beat up so many boys in school because they made fun of me. But boy, did I have some hands on me. You know how humiliating it is for a guy to get his butt whooped by a girl in a dress? That is awful. But, yeah… [Hard laughter] I’ve seen two individuals that I did that to, and they still give me the look of shame. [Laughs] They’re like, Try me now. [Laughs]

RM: When was the last time you put the whoop on a guy?
MR: Oh, gosh, years; not since I did Girlfight.

RM: Are you good with rhymes?
MR: Only when I’m drunk. I can rhyme my butt off when I’m drunk; it’s pretty amazing actually.

RM: What’s the bravest thing you’ve ever done?
MR: I know exactly what the bravest thing I’ve ever done is, for sure. I don’t know if I should say this…People do stupid things when they’re young. I was about 17 years old and hanging out with these hoodlum friends, guys that would do like insurance jobs for fun. These guys were crazy. I’m the fly on the wall. I need to hang out with all different types of people, cuz I love seeing different types of energy. Even as a kid I was attracted to it and I didn’t know why. I was hanging out with these kids and we were just being bad. We were loaded off of God knows what, cuz I don’t do that anymore. We were walking from Jersey City to Union City and my friends were looking for trouble. That was the moment that I decided that I wouldn’t touch a drug ever again, which of course didn’t happen ‘til I was 20. [Laughs] A van pulls up packed with Latin King members and Nietas. These are like gang members with bats, sticks, the whole shebang. At this time I’m like, I really wish I had taken some karate lessons or something cuz like my homeboys ran away. They were like, Yo, Michelle, run! But I’m like, I’m not leavin’ my radio; what are you, stupid? I was surrounded by these 10 guys with sticks and bats. They were like, Yo, give up the radio, bitch. Really rude. I don’t know what came into me, but my dad possessed me and I just started speaking to them like I was teaching them something. I was like, “You guys call yourselves Latin Kings and you’re disrespecting a woman!” I knew about all of these gangs. I knew their laws. They’re like cults, you know what I mean? I talked myself out of getting my butt whooped by 10 guys with sticks and bats and I must say that was my most courageous time, ever. I took my radio and I said, “You want this?” and I broke it. I said, “Come on, hit me; it’ll make you feel like a real man.” Poking at the male ego, making them feel like, What are we gonna get out of this? I could have really gotten hurt that day. Instead I got phone numbers. [Laughs] When they left I was like peeing in my pants, thinking, Does my radio still work? Picking up the pieces.

RM: What do you see God as?
MR: Everything amazing around me, I consider to be God.Whether it’s regurgitated wood, or…Everything we do is just reinterpret God. Look at this, [motions to floor] this is cement, right? Cement is made out of sand. Sand is made out of dead carcasses from the ocean. Glass, we look through our windows; we’re lookin’ through dead bodies. Look at wood; those are dead trees. You live in an inferno, dude. We’re just living among death. We understand that there’s life in that, so we create something new out of all of it.To me everything is God.

RM: Do you have any recurring dreams or nightmares?
MR: Oh, totally. I love dreaming. Nowadays especially, cuz now I get sci-fi dreams. I had a dream that I think had something to do with my Jehovah’s Witness upbringing. There was a seven-headed dragon, and I was by the Great Wall of China in an airplane. Next to me was an American army comrade. There are no water towers by the Great Wall of China, but in my dream there were. I’m looking from the airplane, and as I go up to the seven-headed dragon, there were about six or seven of them. I’m looking up at them and I almost want to go and communicate with this dragon. The guy next to me transforms into an Asian guy and all of a sudden my plane goes down. As I’m going down, the water towers transform into soldier towers, and the guys start shooting at the plane. I look next to me and I’m like, “Why are they shooting at the plane if you’re like them, or are you?” Next thing I know the window’s broken…This is what’s weird, the logic of it. Usually the plane would fall faster than the human falling. I threw the guy from the window and landed on him. I broke my leg and was surrounded by a bunch of Asian guys with AK47s. I’m still alive and there’s this guy underneath me. And I don’t know what happened to the plane. It either blew up or disappeared.

RM: I’ll analyze that and get back to you.
MR: [Laughs] Freud would say it has something to do with sex. Jung would say it has something to do with religion. My dream book says dragons represent wisdom. Those are like people into horoscope stuff and numerology. I don’t like attracting that energy. Keep it in the middle, nice and safe in the middle. [Laughs]

RM:What would you like your final words to be?
MR: “Unity is power, man. Give it up.” Quit trying to be so different.

RM: Quit trying to be so different? Coming from you, that’s ironic.
MR: I’m not tryin’. [Laughs]

RM:We make such a point of our differences, until it becomes a minority of one.
MR: It’s all about communication, man. To be understood I think is the hardest thing.

RM: Have you ever been on welfare?
MR: Yeah, I paid my dues.

RM:What sent your family back to the U.S.?
MR: In the Dominican Republic we were very well off, ‘cuz the Dominican dollar’s nothing in America. They were schooling my brother in high school on the things he learned in 6th grade. My grandmother was, Okay, the kid’s gonna be an engineer one day; we need to move to the States. So, bye-bye maid, bye-bye mansion. Hello welfare. [Laughs] You’re looking out your window every day in the Dominican Republic and you see people naked, mothers begging for money. I saw that as a kid, from my balcony. Meanwhile you have a maid giving you a bath.

RM: Did it make you feel guilty?
MR: I was like, Mommy, why can’t we feed ‘em? I don’t know about guilty, but I did feel like I wanted to help.

RM: If you were named for a virtue, what would that be?
MR: Hardheaded.

RM: Have you ever hunted?
MR: No, I don’t like to shoot at living things. I wouldn’t hesitate to hurt someone who was trying to hurt me. I’m good at shooting; I could take a kneecap off.

RM: Would you go to war for any reason?
MR: Yeah, freedom. If my right to walk, my right to work...Anything that suppresses a woman…I was born this way. Look, I brought my cat with me. People look at me like,What are you crazy? Why does my cat have to stay locked in? It’s curious, needs to be free and has to roam, like me. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else, cuz I feel I’m my freest here. I am judged least in a place that judges the most. I could go to Europe where the woman needs to calm down and do this or do that. I need to be able to do what I want to do, make as much money as I want to make. I love having that and if that were ever taken away I’d be right there, to the death. Give me freedom or give me death, eh? I don’t see the point of life without it.

RM: If you were an animal, what would you be?
MR: Jaguar. Yeah, I’d be a cat.

RM: Where do you see yourself in 10,000 years?
MR: Dead! [Laughs] Unless cryogenics really works and I happen to be a multimillionaire by the time I pass away.

(Source: Risen)