In Michelle Rodiguez‘s gender-bending new movie, “The Assignment,” she plays a male assassin who wakes up to find he’s undergone sex reassignment surgery. The character, Frank Kitchen/Tomboy, then sets off on the trail of the doctor responsible for the drastic change, played by Sigourney Weaver.
“I had to tape my breast down and I still looked like a hermaphrodite,” the actress recently told Page Six at the Whitby Hotel. “… I could try to gain weight but I was vegetarian at the time, so it was really hard for me to gain the weight that I needed when I am not on the right diet.”
She continued, “I only had two weeks to prepare and we were on a $2.5 million budget, which is very tiny for such an ambitious project. So we had a lot of things against us.”
Playing this character made Rodriguez realize she’s more feminine than she thought.
“All my life I felt alienated by women,” she explained. “They were into the lipstick, nails and dressing up and I always felt like a tomboy, like I didn’t fit in. I felt like I had masculine qualities versus feminine qualities just because I am an alpha. I do what I want and never let anybody tell me otherwise. I am kind of hardcore about that. But then when I go and actually play a man, I realized I am such a girl, there is nothing manly about me. The toughest part was wearing a beard because it was really itchy. The minute my hand came up to my face, you could see that I was a woman. I have female fingers. I was so confused growing up, so it took playing a man to make me a woman.”
As difficult as the part was to play at times, Rodriguez said she had no problem switching back to her real self once the cameras stopped rolling.
“There was a scene when I had to put on a c–k with the balls, I did ask for a big one. They glued it on and the hair was so itchy and rubbing up against my leg, it was so nasty. But playing a man, it is real, it did not mess with my psychologically, I am not a Method actress. When you say ‘cut,’ I am back to Michelle. But it did mess with me when I was on set. As soon as the scene was over I was like, ‘Take it off,'” she said. “But it is stamped solid and official I am a girl.”
“The Assignment” was released in theaters and on demand on April 7.