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Avatar star Michelle Rodriguez: running wild
I am lying on the grass outside my hotel on the outskirts of Baton Rouge, Louisiana — a city of Burger King breakfasts for a dollar and giant 4WDs driven by the over-seventies — waiting for the actress Michelle Rodriguez to drive me to New Orleans for Hallowe’en. The sky is blue and cloudless, and I’ve just got a text to say she’s on her way: “I heard from the boys. The party is wild.” The original plan, devised by the film company behind her latest flick, James Cameron’s Avatar, was to do an hour’s interview this afternoon in the local bookshop, near to where she has been staying while working on a film. Luckily, when we met up earlier in the lobby of her hotel, we took one look at each other and knew we shouldn’t stay in town for a moment longer than we had to. “Let’s get outta here,” she said. “It’s gonna to kick off in New Orleans tonight.”
Now she’s outside my hotel, toot-tooting her horn, in a sporty open-top car, bag flung in the back, cigarettes on the dash, a tiny, gorgeous boy-girl-girl-boy with a curtain of dark hair and a baseball cap with “Unstoppable” embroidered on it. “Hey, put your bags in the back,” she growls in undiluted New Jersey. “Lock it all down and let’s go.” I recognise her from Girlfight, the movie that made her 10 years ago. A sexy, surly 19-year-old from the New Jersey ghetto playing a sexy, surly boxer girl from the Brooklyn ghetto. She also did two seasons of Lost, played Vin Diesel’s girlfriend in The Fast and the Furious, a soldier in Resident Evil, Colin Farrell’s sidekick in Swat. But the last I heard, she was jumping out of a wheelchair in arrivals at Mexico City airport, screaming blue murder in Spanish at a reporter. There was also something about wearing a police ankle bracelet to a Marc Jacobs show in New York. She’s fresh from boot camp, where she has been in training for an action movie, and I dread to think what she did to them there, but the mannish charisma that fills up the screen — that’s almost too much for it — is softer in real life. We hit the freeway, roof down, Aerosmith blaring. I have just got off an 18-hour flight, she’s been filming for 10 days solid, and we both want to go fast, so we do.
Where’s she been, then? Three years ago, her celestial trajectory had seemed assured. Girlfight had led to Oscar talk, gushing rumblings about “the female Brando”. Lots of parts in lots of films. A shoo-in for roles demanding an “actress with attitude”. The sort of woman men are at once hot for and slightly afraid of. Next thing you know, she’s fallen off the star map, thrown it all away. Nonstop partying. Two DUIs (driving under the influence). A spell in rehab. A few hours in jail. Opprobrium from press and industry. Then, worse: obscurity. She went from deliciously bad-girl to unemployable.
At 31, she’s back, hovering between anonymity and the big time. Cameron cast her as one of the female leads in his $300m (£180m) 3-D blockbuster, about a band of humans landing on a planet populated by a humanoid race. It’s her comeback, her chance. “What you’re seeing is the last layer being peeled away,” she says, lighting a cigarette. “I’m ready to let people know who I really am. And I agree with Jay-Z, 30 is the new 20. It’s a beautiful place to be.”i
make her tell me what happened. “I was on Crescent Heights Boulevard in LA, and I was at a red light,” she says. “I’d just finished doing Blue Crush. And I had money. I had success. Everybody was kissing my ass. And I felt empty. And I was like, this sucks, I need my pain back. And, boy, did I get it back...
“Gosh, how it sucks when everyone doesn’t know who you really are. You just wanna hide in the bosom of an alien. Someone who understands the macrocosmic purpose of existence, not some minuscule aspect of it. Afterwards, I’m in rehab, I’m in jail. And I’m like, what did I do to get in here? I asked for it, I got it. People call it self-destructive, but it’s only self-destructive when it’s not controlled, and I called it on myself. The universe is truly a magical place.”
Her conversation is a blend of the impatiently rational — she describes herself as a “tech geek” — and the defiantly mystical. She grew up, a kid with a Jehovah’s Witness mother from the Dominican Republic and a Puerto Rican father, among “drug dealers, schemers and hustlers”. She gave up the church — “I thought it sounded kind of selfish to run around trying to save other people, when I was saving myself, really” — and grew a dream of becoming a writer. She says it’s the only reason she got into acting. “I did some research, and I realised that they don’t respect writers in the business. So I have to become an actress first.” We talk politics: “You can’t holler at a person about ethics when they’re worried about eating tomorrow.” She loves video games. And aliens. Last year, she discovered anarchical capitalism. “A 25-year-old boy introduced me to that idea at the Cannes film festival. I fell in love with him. I wanted to kiss him on the lips.” She sighs. “I got no solution for world issues. I learnt from my dad not to stick my nose where it doesn’t belong. He died an alcoholic. He was that guy. The one telling political stories at the local bar for 10 years.”
It’s taking us for ever to get to New Orleans. It’s only 70 miles, but we’re talking so much, we’ve done a loop and, after an hour and a half, find ourselves not far from where we started. “F***,” she says, as we pass a Welcome to Louisiana sign. “Did we just leave the state?” Soon we’re bombing towards the sunset across marshlands, with Empire of the Sun lifting us into the concrete jungle of central New Orleans. “Could he have a bigger car?” she says quietly, giving a Hummer the evil eye as one slides by on the flyover.
We check in at the W hotel. Already, there are people in Hallowe’en garb everywhere. Rodriguez is carrying only one bag, a beautiful suitcase someone got her in Italy. “Faux chic,” she says. She opens it. I’m expecting film-star wardrobe options, but there are no clothes in there; it’s a sound desk for DJing. We head out to Walmart to look for outfits.
In the lift, I point out that she’s still wearing a face pack. “Yeah, I’m a tribal beautician,” she says, zooming down the corridor and out the door to ask the valet guys for her car. In Walmart, the shelves in the Hallowe’en section are empty, but I find a kid’s fireman jacket and axe and she finds a bandanna for tying across her face. The whole bill comes to $6 and I pay. “Are you sure? Thank you so much,” and she says it like someone just bought her jewels.
Back at the hotel, we order up martinis and then some more and do make-up. I ask her about the most recent tabloid moment: Bridesmaidzilla. The story went that she’d pushed a number of people into the pool at the wedding of her best friend in the Dominican Republic. She’s exasperated. “I’m not that loud. And when I do get loud, it’s by default. People say, ‘Oh, Michelle jumped into the pool with her top off.’ It was a dare. Somebody said I didn’t love them, and I said I do, and okay... Boosh! It’s like a surge of joy,” she says. “It’s like... when I’m synchronised with my path. When I’m thinking this is what I wanted, this is where I need to be. It doesn’t matter how good or bad the situation, I’ll get that surge of joy.”
The bar downstairs is overrun with zombies and giant Little Bo Peeps. Michelle, who now looks like an Italian student anarchist, orders a “Johnnie Blue, neat”. She says: “You wouldn’t believe how many 50-year-old men open up to me when they see me drinking Johnnie Blue. I get offered cigars all the time.” She explains her formula for the ultimate modern fashion brand. To my drunken, jet-lagged ears it sounds like it couldn’t fail. “My friend Dana and I were talking to all of our rich friends about money. Then the recession happened.” How much did she need? “A hundred million.”
I don’t think she has many friends in the business, but two close ones are Olivier Martinez (“a good, deep friend for six years”) and Vin Diesel (“he’ll be a good friend until the day I die”). Penelope Cruz she’ll “say hi to”, and Salma “gives me advice now and again”. “I find the grand majority are doing psychological work, and every job is like therapy. I can’t deal with that shit,” which is a surprisingly unforgiving thing to say for someone so analytical. I’m supposed to find out if she’s a lesbian. Is she? She has a devoted gay following. Perez Hilton is always trying to out her. She’s said: “If I wanted to tell people what I do with my vagina, I’d have made a sex video a long time ago.” She quotes the Indian mystic Osho on love, and says with mild exasperation: “Largely, people don’t know the whole story about anything. But still they need to put a name on it so that they can label it and put it on the side and not have to dedicate time to figuring it out. It’s laziness.”
I’m not sure she’s gay. I think that, like a lot of clever women her age, she loves men, but finds the female of the species more fascinating. She’s currently rewriting a script based on the 1990s indie film Bandits, about four girls on the run from the law. “My favourite thing to be a part of is kick-ass girls. In the films I write, even if I’m not in them, I want to push powerful women. I like Angelina Jolie because of her ability to harness masculine and feminine energy into one. There are certain people who are so sexual that it doesn’t matter how old they get, they’re still sexual. Angie, at 50, will still be sexual.”
Outside, the streets are heaving. Rodriguez hauls her suitcase with the sound desk in it up Bourbon Street, through the crowd, to a balcony a member of the film crew has rented to party on. Earlier, I asked her if she regretted anything. “I don’t regret anything I’ve ever done. I love every moment, I kiss it every day. I’m a rough kid. Sometimes you need to literally slap me in the face to snap me out of my passionate state of mind.” A drunk girl dressed as Dorothy stops her and says: “Hey, do people mistake you for Michelle Rodriguez?” “All the time, man, all the time!” she says. “Yeah, I get that a lot.” “Well, you’re a thousand times more beautiful than her,” says the girl. “Thanks, man,” she says.
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