Michelle Rodriguez owes her career to the Jehovah’s Witnesses, said Elaine Lipworth in the London Daily Mail. The actress, 32, has made a career out of tough-chick roles—a persona she developed growing up as a Dominican in Texas whose family belonged to that proselytizing faith. “My family was very strict. I went to church every day, and I’d go knocking on people’s doors with my grandma trying to save their souls,” she says. When word spread at school that she was different, trouble followed. “A lot of people made fun of me, and I didn’t like that, so I got into fights.”
She was expelled from five different schools for fighting and for questioning her teachers. “As a Jehovah’s Witness, I was learning about the history of the world and current affairs, and I absorbed everything. So when I was at school and they were teaching American history, I thought they were liars.” She’s since left the faith, but the feistiness she developed defending it helped her land her first acting gig, playing a female boxer. “I told them I had no acting experience whatsoever, but I could kick every girl’s ass in the room,” she says. “I beat 350 girls to get the role.”
Subscribe to The Week
Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.
Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.
-
'There is a lot riding on the deal for both sides'Instant Opinion Opinion, comment and editorials of the day
-
Pharaoh's tomb discovered for first time in 100 yearsSpeed Read This is the first burial chamber of a pharaoh unearthed since Tutankhamun in 1922
-
Microsoft unveils quantum computing breakthroughSpeed Read Researchers say this advance could lead to faster and more powerful computers
