The Fast Franchise Stunt Michelle Rodriguez Wants To Pull In Real Life
"Fast X," the latest installment in the "Fast & Furious" series, has finally arrived. The blockbuster action franchise has pulled in well over $1 billion in ticket sales since the first film appeared in 2001, and "Fast X" will be the first in a three-part conclusion to the long-running series. Michelle Rodriguez has appeared throughout the franchise as Leticia "Letty" Ortiz and has experienced a truly wild arc during her tenure. At one point she even came back from the dead with amnesia and worked against her partner Dominic Toretto (Vin Diesel).
In an interview with Capital FM, Rodriguez was asked if there was a stunt from the films that she would like to re-enact in real life, and she cited the opening sequence from the fourth film in the franchise, which was released in 2009. "'Fast Four', on top of the gas truck," Rodriguez recalled. Rodriguez then shared how when she was young she performed a similar — and very dangerous — stunt using her own personal vehicle.
"So when I was a kid," she said, "my first car was a Nissan Frontier and I used to like riding on top of it. My record is 80 miles an hour on top of the Nissan Frontier on the rack. You obviously can't do that today."
The scene was filmed at a much slower speed and with proper safety precautions
In the opening scene of the fourth film in the series, which takes place in the Dominican Republic, Letty climbs out of the car she is riding in with Dom and jumps onto a chain of tanker trucks, climbing on top of one of them as they speed down a winding mountain highway. The gang then pulls off the complicated and dangerous heist, detaching some of the tankers and hooking one up to a truck and hauling it away. At one point early in the theft, Han (Sung Kang) says he thought they would be robbing banks instead of fuel trucks, and Letty responds, "Down here, gas is gold."
Things don't go exactly as planned, and Letty ends up having to jump from the back of the speeding tanker into the open window of Dom's car. Dom then has to pull off some expert driving maneuvers to avoid hitting the tanker as it explodes. During her Capital FM interview, Rodriguez recalled that the filming was actually much safer than her off-screen childhood adventures in her own vehicle. "I had a brace or whatever that connected me to it to make sure that I wouldn't die," she said. "My stunt double got to do it at like 40 miles an hour and I was doing it at 25 which was lame when I have an 80-mile-an-hour record ..."