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.”
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