Michelle Rodriguez on Discovering Acting

I am actually a success story for Back Stage. I had been doing extra work in New York for about two years, interested mostly in learning about the art of writing scripts, and I became interested in becoming an actress. I noticed that people in the film industry seemed to respect actors more than writers. My brother Omar had come home from Stevens Institute Tech for the summer and started digging into my brain about responsibility, picking a career and a path in life, etc. He was, to my surprise, incredibly supportive of my newfound wish to stay out of a fluorescent-lit office from 9 to 5 and join the creative struggle as an actress-writer. The very first sign of his support was a fresh issue of Back Stage. He told me where to get it and how this is what actors used to find opportunities. To me, this newspaper was a mounting heap of potential—a magic book full of opportunity.

I was way too bummed out to go on any auditions at the time; too many friends I did extra work with were getting rejected left and right. I just gave up the possibility altogether that someone could see in me more potential than I saw in myself. I really wanted to avoid that predicament at all cost, so at first I settled for the extra-work ads. I did extra work in "Summer of Sam," "The Cradle Will Rock," "For the Love of the Game," etc. Cut to two years later. I was now getting hounded by my other brother, Raul, to get a life, one that paid something substantial and didn't involve sitting around all day goofing off in the backdrop of a flick for 60 bucks. At this point I was about to give up, both extra work and the possibility of being judged at an audition by someone with absolutely no clue of what I was capable of.

Well, that week, I was looking in the regular paper for a job to hold me over till I got a clue to life. After several phone calls to dead-end jobs around town, I looked at my week-old Back Stage issue. There it was: Open casting call, looking for a female boxer to fill a lead role in a film called "Girlfight," Latin descent, lead character casting. Reading that, I thought to myself, "I qualify three times for this role." I'm Latin; I like to lead the way; half the girls I saw onscreen at the time couldn't kick my butt in a street fight if they tried. What have I got to lose? I thought to myself, "Technically, it's not an audition, because it's a casting call. Go for it, Michelle!"

The open casting call was the following day. I have to say, after all that thought put into following my gut and hopping the train to New York that afternoon to make the audition, I had gotten cold feet, deciding it would be better to go to Six Flags with some friends instead. Believe it or not, if it weren't for both that issue of Back Stage and a friend from Jersey (my best friend at the time, Tony), who ditched out on our newly planned summer fun for the day, I would have missed the casting call that led to my current career. I would probably be writing fantasy novels, working for some magazine, or planning my whole life around a travel blog. Either way, my path would have definitely been drastically different than it is today.

Thank you, Back Stage, brother Omar for introducing the magazine, and Tony for not making it to Six Flags the day of the audition. If it weren't for those factors, amongst many other variables not worth mentioning (like that of my mother giving birth to me), I would never have ended up hopping the train into New York to that casting call, four hours late, and eventually, after a month of tryouts, landing the role.

Cheers,

M Rod

After starring in the critically acclaimed "Girlfight," Michelle Rodriguez starred in such films as "The Fast and the Furious," "Resident Evil," "S.W.A.T.," and "Avatar." She was also a series regular on "Lost."