- Just like, tell it like it is.
I don't care if it hurts.
But don't try to put some shimmer over it
and be something you're not 'cause it's annoying.
Makes me wanna punch you.
Hi, I'm Michelle Rodriguez
and today I'm going to let Elle ask me anything.
(gentle music)
Vulgar, unfiltered, crazy.
My first job, I believe that was working at Toys"R"Us,
you know, when they overhire people
during Christmas and stuff.
And I remember losing my job
because I kept using the skateboard
to skateboard through the aisles.
I tried to use the excuse,
I was just showing the toys to the kids,
but they didn't buy it.
- Woo!
- God, I was such a knucklehead.
My God, I don't think I stopped being a knucklehead
till I was like, 35.
It took me a long time to grow up.
I would say, don't open your heart so easily
and stop believing everything that people say.
That's tough.
Because when it comes to nature, I'd say, LA.
But New York is more for the people.
Like, I love the melting pot of a city.
I love the ethnicities that,
I love the different foods and the reality
of being in the struggle or the hustle that New York brings,
it makes everybody real, it makes them raw
and then there's no facade.
I just like people who keep it real.
Just like, tell it like it is,
I don't care if it hurts.
But don't try to put some shimmer over it
and be something you're not 'cause it's annoying.
Makes me wanna punch you.
I'd probably say, the car I bought, the M3
and I was slightly silly
because when I crashed it for the first time,
you know, in Los Angeles, California
when you move from New York to Los Angeles,
you have three crashes that need to happen
before you can call yourself a Los Angeles driver.
I mean, for anybody in their 20s, this is standard.
And when I crash my M3, it was supposed to be totaled
but I decided to fix it because it was my first luxury car.
Meanwhile, all my buddies are like, it's ruined.
You can't, the resale value's ruined
'cause it's supposed to be totaled,
but you decided to fix it.
So, I ended up spending more on that car than I should have.
And I gotta say, it wasn't the smartest choice.
That I have a big affinity for musicals
like Cabaret, West Side Story, Chicago
and I love kroner music.
And I'm a big fan of people like Eartha Kitt,
Ella Fitzgerald, Nina Simone,
like, that's my relaxed vibes.
There is one of the Fast films,
I think it was Fast 6,
where the Dominic Toretto character played by Vin Diesel
is flying across the highway
to link up with the Letty Ortiz character
who he literally she's launched from a moving tank
into mid-air
and he's launched from his moving car into mid-air
and he catches in her mid-air
and from one side of the highway to the other
with this massive gap that you can fall,
you know, thousands of feet to the ground
and then they land on a car.
That was the gnarliest stunt
because even though we did it with green screen,
you had these lines that you hang off of
and the lines fly you at least 25 miles an hour.
It's really cool.
The stunt doubles did it even faster,
but we had to get on those rigs
and kind of fly towards each other
and so, that we could do the catch sequence
so they could recreate it in CGI and that was fantastic.
I think it was LL Cool J when we were doing S.W.A.T.
It was about when you're being offered things,
it was the idea of saying yes to everything
and figuring it out afterwards.
But I do recall a lot of what he said
making sense later in life
because I didn't get it at that moment.
But then years later I'm like, that's what he meant.
And it was just all about the disposition that one has
when they're in the game and the flow opens.
How you keep the flow open
and how you keep the abundance coming.
And it was all about saying yes to life.
Hero.
You know, a hero anti-villain.
Like, a hero that's not really a hero,
an unexpected hero perhaps.
'Cause there's a rebel side to me that never walks straight.
I'm always like, crooked.
I kind of cradle the line
between society and then the borders of it.
Because I do believe in the common idea of good
but I don't believe in the common idea of how to get there.
Well, I'm deep into occult mysticism.
The history of religions around the world fascinates me.
Also, spirituality in different kind.
Right now, I'm obsessed with Toltec mysticism
and the spirituality coming from Mexico
and I can't believe all the similarities we find
in occult mysticism from the Toltec ancients,
the Aztecs and the Mayans,
comparing it to a lot of the European Christian mysticism.
I realize the more similar
the cultures around the world are than different.
I like Trudy Chacon from Avatar, man.
She was really cool.
I think in another life
I would've been in the military somehow.
There's a certain excitement about it.
I don't know why I glorified it so much growing up
but I always loved the agents and the secret service
and the, you know, the military special ops.
I've always had an affinity towards
what what they do for a living.
I gotta say it was a lot harder
'cause I had to gain 15 pounds of muscle.
I think it was more closely related
to Girl Fight than anything.
'Cause when I first got into the game
with the first movie I did, which was Girl Fight
about 23 years ago,
I had gained about a good 20 pounds of muscle for that.
I trained for like three months
of hardcore weight training to do that and boxing.
And for Holga, I did about the same amount
of three months of training, hardcore
with weights and everything
and protein shakes and all of that.
To maintain that weight, it takes a lot of eating.
I'm a little worn out
and I'm having a hard time shedding it, man.
It's tougher as you get older.
That's all I gotta say about that.
Thanks for hanging out with me and Elle.
Go see the movie.
Ciao.