The controversial 2016 role Michelle Rodriguez would never get away with today: “Guys, calm down”
From the torrid output of the Fast & Furious franchise to the 400 different Resident Evil movies to the incomprehensibly stupid Battle: Los Angeles, Michelle Rodriguez’s strategy seems to involve choosing movies with big explosions and no plot where she can play essentially the same person every time.
There are some exceptions to this, like the Steve McQueen film Windows, which got good reviews, but for the most part, her career is littered with duds, and one of the most shocking entries in her filmography is the 2016 thriller The Assignment.
Known as (Re)Assignment when it was first released, it starred Sigourney Weaver as a disgraced plastic surgeon without a job, performing illegal experiments on homeless people, who, after tracking down the man who murdered her son, decides to forcibly change his gender from male to female.
Rodriguez plays the hitman Frank Kitchen in both pre- and post-op, and she spent four hours a day in makeup to prepare the prosthetics needed to play the character.
As you can imagine, this caused quite a stir; a number of transgender activist groups decried the film for presenting gender-reaffirming surgery as a punishment and a series of boycotts were organised against the film. Director Walter Hill, who once had his name removed from a movie he wasn’t proud of, was more than happy to defend this one, as was its star.
Speaking to The Hollywood Reporter at the Toronto International Film Festival, Rodriguez refused to acknowledge the issues with The Assignment, and instead took the bizarre approach of telling the people she had offended that they were being too serious.
“I think the transgender situation, you could talk about that if you were talking about the psychology or the social aspects of the situation,” she said, “It’s not about that. It’s an action genre film, and we’re not trying to get psychological or deep about it, so lay off. It’s an entertainment piece, guys, calm down. I’m on your team.”
Where to even start with that! First of all, I am not transgender, so I would never dare assume to know how they feel about this situation or wider issues facing the community. That being said, this response disgusts me because to tell a group of people who have faced horrendous persecution to “calm down” when their lives are being used as fodder in a crappy B-movie is short-sighted and ignorant. It’s also incredibly stupid to claim that films that are “entertainment pieces” don’t have deeper meanings; that is literally how art works.
In an era where many actors have looked back on playing transgender roles and recognised they were wrong, hearing Rodriguez say things like this is incredibly disappointing. This was over ten years ago, so there’s every chance she could feel differently now, but reading these comments in the cold, hard light of the current plight facing the transgender community doesn’t sit well.
