From sweet to savage! Gina Rodriguez may be best known for playing the titular lead in Jane the Virgin, but she got physical in the sci-fi thriller Annihilation, also starring Natalie Portman.
Rodriguez and Portman are part of an expedition that enters the Shimmer, an anomaly which other teams have entered but never returned from. The Shimmer warps and transforms everything inside — from plants to humans.
One of the scariest scenes in the thriller is when the women are attacked by a mutated bear in a cabin. In this exclusive clip from the Digital and Blu-Ray edition, fans get a behind-the-scenes look at the violent encounter.
Rodriguez did her own stunts, including being thrown up against a wall and tossed around on a staircase.
“She got picked up and slammed hard by the guy a size of a bear,” director/screenwriter Alex Garland explained. Indeed, the actress took hit after hit from a stuntman wearing a motion capture suit.
Rodriguez was so committed to the role that she helped choreographed the sequence and even wanted to forego protective padding.
According to stunt coordinator Jo McLaren, “I had to play a mom a little bit. [Gina] was like, ‘I don’t need my pads on!’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, you’re going to put your pads on.’ When the adrenaline is going and she also has the emotion of the character … that’s part of my job is to make sure she can do all that acting and the emotional without having to worry about the physical side.”
You can watch Gina in action in Annihilation, out on Digital May 22 and DVD and Blu-Ray May 29. She’ll next flex her action muscles in Miss Bala, a remake of the Mexican crime thriller.
