July 2011By Philip Berk
The moment director Steven Soderbergh saw footage of MixedMartialArts fighter Gina Carano on the Cage he decided to build a film around her.
The result is Haywire in which she plays a black ops supersoldier who seeks revenge after she is betrayed her colleagues played by Ewan McGregor and Channing Tatum.
In the film Gina is a knockout, finally we have a real life action hero!
So how did Channing get up the nerve to attack her in their first scene?
“Trust me. It too a lot of taunting from Gina. Being from the South, it’s engrained in you, never even act threateningly towards a woman, much less hit her. I couldn’t physically do it for a good like five minutes. We rehearsed it. And then Gina was like, ‘Do it. Come on.’ And I’m like, ‘I can’t do this.’ And she’s like, ‘Look, I can take it.’ And I’m like, ‘I know you can take it. I don’t know if I can take it.’ And then she called me the ‘P-word’ and challenged my manhood, and I hit her. And it was one of those like moments where you’re like, ‘Oh my god, what did I just do?’ But then she came back with that ‘I’m going to kill you’ face, and you wanted to run. I kept telling myself, ‘I think I’m faster than her in a sprint, but she might have better conditioning than me, so I gotta like pace myself…”
He laughs.
Ewan is more nonchalant.
“It’s funny,” he tells me, “I didn’t feel that way at all. Maybe because I’m not a fight fan. I don’t watch fights or anything. Only when Steven told me the story did I watch Gina’s stuff on YouTube. I watched her fighting. And it’s brutal, brutal stuff. But I don’t have any element of that in me. I’ve been beaten up a couple of times, but I never really had a fight. I don’t think I ever landed a punch on anyone. But I had so much admiration for her as a fighter, and also as a person, because I’d acted with her before we did our fight. That was the last thing we shot together, our fight scene. I already knew what it was like to work with her. And I knew I was working with an equal. And someone I felt safe with. And so when it came to the fight, I was like a technician trying to make the fight as real as possible. I didn’t actually hit her. I punched her once on the top of the head by accident. But I wasn’t going in to actually hit her – like Channing had to smash a bottle in her face, Fassbender had to push her head into a wall. I just had to fake-fight with her. And so I didn’t experience that, ‘Oh my god, she’s a girl. I can’t possibly do this.’ I didn’t feel that at all. Probably because I knew she’s so much tougher than I am.”
Gina agrees.
“I wasn’t there to hurt anybody. The stunt crew had told me, you’re going to be the stunt girl and the lead actress. So you have two jobs in a way. Usually they rely on the stunt people to take care of the actors. But I was playing both of those roles. And it wasn’t really hard to do because all these actors wanted to do everything themselves. There’s not one thing that they didn’t want to do. Even when they were off camera, they wanted to do everything themselves. I don’t know if that’s normal with films, but I think I got pretty lucky with some pretty great guys.
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