sional tips. And Santiago Dou
glas (The Sopranos), as a fellow
boxer who becomes taken with
this femme fighter, was particu
larly helpful during the film’s
sweeter scenes. “I was really in
timidated by him because he
just knew what he was doing,”
Rodriguez remembers. “But
[we] clicked right away. That
was a cool thing, because I had
never really fallen in love with
anybody, so it was hard for me
to drag that out of personal ex
periences.”
That’s not to say Rodriguez’s
life has been short on adventure.
Bom to a Puerto Rican father and
a Dominican mother, she lived in
Texas until her parents divorced.
At age 8, she relocated with her
mother and an older brother to
the Dominican Republic, where
they stayed with Rodriguez’s ma
ternal grandmother. “I was living
really lovely down there,” she
says. “We had a maid; we were
pretty well off. I would look down
outside my balcony, and it was
complete, utter poverty. People
walking the streets naked and
stuff. At the time I was so young,
it was just crazy for me to watch.”
Then came time in Puerto Rico
with her father, a teacher who
passed away in 1997. When Ro
driguez was 12, she returned to
the States—to Jersey City, N J.—
where she tried to maintain a bal
ance between her mother’s strict
beliefs as a Jehovah’s Witness and her
father’s more cerebral ideals. “He was
all about Sigmund Freud...Darwin, and
Carl Jung,” she says. “Complete, utter
controversy—because when I got back
[from visiting him, Mom] was all about
God. But at 14, I liberated myself and
started exploring the world more.”
That “liberation” led to days spent
hanging out in Manhattan’s Wash
ington Square Park, failing grades, and
a stint in juvenile hall.
It also led to an aggressiveness
intrinsic to making Girlfiglit work.
“We needed to find somebody who re
ally took to the sport and wasn’t
afraid to mess up their face,” Kusama
says. “Among a lot of actors—I don’t
begrudge it at all—their1 face is their1
bread and butter, but I found there
was resistance to what the role was:
a boxer who really mixes it up. We
had to have someone who didn’t fear
getting hurt—somebody who appears
very comfortable with that risk.
Michelle did.”
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