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Michelle Rodriguez has been working in the entertainment industry for more than 25 years and has starred in dozens of movies, including eight “Fast and the Furious” films, but she admitted this week that her religious upbringing left her feeling like she was in the “devil’s world” when she first came to Hollywood.
“I came from a Jehovah’s Witness background at the time,” the 48-year-old said at a 25th anniversary screening of the 2001 original in Los Angeles on Monday, according to People magazine. “So it’s like none of this really means anything to me. And so you’re dealing with a kid who’s not affected. I’m already playing in the so-called devil’s world in my mind as a 20-year-old, obviously.”
Rodriguez had been in just two independent films, “Girlfight” and “3 A.M.,” before she was cast as Letty Ortiz in the street racing franchise.
“I was just getting introduced to what it is to be an actor in New York,” Rodriguez told People. “And then I think Vin [Diesel] had seen ‘Girlfight’ and he really liked the character and wanted that character to be his girlfriend in ‘Fast.’”
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Besides not giving two “s—s” about the movie because of her strict upbringing, “I really loved being able to get in a car, train, learn how to shoot guns, learn how to race cars,” she told People. “To me, that was the exciting thing. Doing things that you weren’t allowed to do in real life. Break windows, be violent, all that stuff.”
“The Fast and the Furious” centers on an undercover police officer, played by the late Paul Walker, who infiltrates a street racing gang led by Diesel’s character.
Rodriguez discussed how intense her upbringing was in 2020 on Facebook Watch’s Red Table Talk.
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“I mean, birthdays and celebrating Halloween are like evil,” she explained at the time. “I didn’t get to watch Disney movies ‘til I was in my teens because of all the witchcraft.”
In 2015, she told Interview magazine that the religion “kind of scarred me for life.”
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She said she felt like she was living a “double life” when she went door to door with her family.
“Sometimes I’d knock on the door of somebody I was going to school with, so it was like living a double life,” she admitted. “At school, I was this tomboy kid who just loved to hang out with her friends and learn curse words, trying to fit in with the cool kids and defending all the kids who got picked on.”
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