Maggie Q shines on the big screen in The Protégé, out August 20. The action thriller follows an assassin named Anna (Q) who seeks revenge after the death of her father figure Moody (Samuel L. Jackson).
The action star spoke to Screen Rant about developing her character physically and emotionally, as well as what she and director Martin Campbell hoped to bring to the story.
Screen Rant: The Protégé is an action-packed thrill ride with great characters and dynamic relationships. One of those dynamic relationships is with Anna and her mentor Moody. Can you talk to me a little bit about their relationship and working with Samuel L. Jackson?
Maggie Q: It was a really important one for us, and for Martin, because a lot of times in these action movies and in many films, you're focused on romantic connections and relationships and all that sort of stuff. You rarely see platonic, father-daughter-type relationships, where people are actually best friends and on each other's side and there for one another.
Martin was so adamant that the friendship had to come through, and that you had to really feel their connection and how much they cared about each other. It required some work for us, and I think that it took a while to cast that role. And when we finally cast Sam, I was really pleased because I already instinctually knew that we would have a leg up on our relationship. I just had an instinct we would get along.
Can you talk to me about what fascinated you the most about the character of Anna?
Maggie Q: I love her persona and this storefront life that she led. Being raised by Sam, they both had this public persona, and then they had this career that was completely secret, that only the two of them knew about. Then they lived this life in public that was seemingly very normal.
I love the idea that anyone you or I know, myself and you included, could have that going on. Everybody presents a certain way they want to. They take it to an extreme, obviously, because their entire careers are based on something that people don't know about. But I loved the idea of juggling those two, and for her to have to ultimately go back and confront the life that she knew, that she left, and that she ultimately rejected to start this new existence. All because she needed to heal and couldn't deal with it.
Her story is very full circle. Her arc is very complete in this film, and that's really what it was that I loved the most.
What did you want to bring to the role of Anna that wasn't necessarily on the page?
Maggie Q: I think part of what was in the writing, and that Michael [Keaton] and I thought was very important to magnify, was that their chemistry is not so much a sexual chemistry as much as it is a battle of wits.
Everyone knows that when they meet someone who's their equal, it's very attractive. When you meet someone who catches you off guard because they just have something about them. He says to her when he meets her, "You're interesting to me. Why are you interesting? No one's interesting to me."
It's funny to be able to bring that to life in that way, where you have these two people who come together and they're not really sure what just happened. They meet and they're like, "Wait a minute, why was I affected by this person?" That's very hard to do. It's so much more interesting to me than just meeting someone and being like, "You're attractive, I'm attractive. We should probably get physical because we're both kind of attractive." It's not that relationship whatsoever. It's two people playing this game with very high stakes, and that was what Michael and I focused on.
Rembrandt is an alluring and charming adversary. Can you talk to me about how Anna views him and your experience working with Michael Keaton?
Maggie Q: Well, she obviously has her daddy issues, and the only love that she has known for the last 30 years was the fatherly love of this older man who took her in and raised her, and gave her life. Now she meets this older gentleman and her go-to is, "Well, this is interesting."
She's so highly intelligent. So if a male model walks by that's not interesting to Anna. What's interesting to Anna is somebody who's on her level, same as Rembrandt.
And working with Michael was a dream. It's always a dream when you work with someone who you admire, who you then get to have a real experience with. And what I mean by that is somebody who's willing to put the time and the energy and the work in, because they know what's important to the film and they know what the end result needs to be for us to pull it off.
I know it sounds so obvious. You're like, "Of course somebody's going to show up and put the work in." No, no, no. That is not true. People have different work ethics, and Michael was so dedicated to our chemistry and so dedicated to the written word. He had so much respect for me and the writer [Richard Wenk], and we were able to all work together. It was so collaborative, and that meant a lot to me. You can be in environments that are that, and you can be in environments that aren't, and you're not going to get the result you want if the environment isn't that.
All this action comes with a lot of training, but you're kind of a real-life protégé after training under the great Jackie Chan. Can you talk to me about how you prepare for something like this and how your experience working with him helped you in a role like this?
Maggie Q: I'll tell you what working with Jackie does for you. Number one: the work ethic is extreme. He did not get to work years by being lazy and not putting the work in. He's one of the hardest workers I've ever known. His team is the best in the world.
One of the things that I experienced working in Asia and working around him with his team, and on the films I did that he produced at the time, was there wasn't a lot of time. In American films, you have pre-production, so you've got time. Keanu [Reeves] had six months [training] for The Matrix, you know? What a luxury. We didn't have that when I was working with Jackie at the time.
I'm a person who learns very fast, and I can be incredibly effective right away - because I had to be, and Jackie expected that. Not only of his team, he expected it of himself and anyone who's around him. You don't really have the luxury to mess around. You have to learn things quickly, and you have to be good at them quickly.
For this movie, I had to have surgery a couple of months [before], so I had to be resting. When I jumped into this film, I was not doctor's orders ready to start an action film. But I didn't care, so I did it anyway. I didn't have as much time as I needed to prepare for a movie this big, but what I did have in my back pocket was the experience to learn quickly and effectively and be able to perform, regardless of whether I have two months to train or two days to train. I can do that.
Martin Campbell is no stranger to action films. He's done The Foreigner with Jackie Chan, Casino Royale, Goldeneye, and the Zorro movies. Can you talk to me about how Martin approached the action in The Protégé?
Maggie Q: I'll tell you this. Martin approached the acting with so much more care and consideration than he did the action. It's almost like, when you know you're really good at something, you don't put more of the focus on that. He is the great Martin Campbell, so that's all going to be great.
And there were even moments where he came to me and he's like, "The night's going long, and we may have to cut this." And I'm like, "No!" It was me fighting for keeping the choreography together. Him going, "We're running out of time, and me going, "No, I want this fight to look like this." Isn't that funny?
Because, obviously, he's got his eyes on the prize. He has to make a whole movie, whereas I'm focused on the thing that's in front of me and wanting that thing to be its best. So, I was the one being pushy about the action, funnily enough.
Was there anything else that surprised you about his directing style and what it added to The Protégé?
Maggie Q: That surprised me? I guess one of the biggest surprises would have been that he has such a good sense of dialogue. He has such a good sense of comedic timing.
Sometimes when he would do takes, he wouldn't be looking at the monitor and he'd have his eyes closed. He's hearing it and, instinctively, he's like, "That doesn't work." He'll pop up and be like, "That doesn't work. My ear is not getting it for these reasons." He'd look up here and there, but he was very instinctual when it came to the tone of the film, and he was always right. That was very inspiring.
You did a lot of the stunts on this, but was there any that proved more challenging while you were making this film?
Maggie Q: I did this jump in the film. When I'm doing the jump in the movie, I jumped backwards, which is completely terrifying on its own. But when I was testing the descender and we were in rehearsals, I obviously had to see where I was going initially. We put me up in the wire after we had waited on the descender, and all the weights were taken off, they put me in the harness and I'm doing the stunt for the first time in the rehearsals. I had to see where I was going, so I'm really stepping off the ledge and falling four stories. And it was so terrifying.
Human instinct when you look down is like, "Don't jump!" Everything in our bodies tells us not to jump. Every cell in your body is like, "Don't do that! You're going to end up on the floor." But in order to be able to learn the stunt backwards, I had to start the stunt forwards. And weirdly, it was more terrifying to jump face first than it was backwards.
What are you hoping audiences take away the most after they see The Protégé, besides the amazing training and fights that you did?
Maggie Q: What our dream was, and Martin and I talked about it many times, was that we want people to be entertained on every level. There are fun moments, there are big action moments, all these things. But we really them to be affected by the relationship. It was our dream.
We wanted them to care about Anna and Moody. We wanted them to be like, "Why can't they just drop everything they know and ride off in the sunset?" No, that's not reality. People like them don't live happily ever after. They can't, it's not in their DNA. It was important to be just super realistic in that way.
Even Rembrandt, this experienced contract killer, was like, "Let's do it. Why can't we have peace? What is it that you think is going to happen? What is it that you're afraid [of]?" But she completely rejects the reality of it. And that's not a typical female response to the offer of, "Hey, do you want love and peace?" It's like, "No, you're not living in reality. I am."
I just think Richard is such a great writer. And I think that his writing was so smart. I love the dinner scene because it reminds me of a throwback to those great movies that we loved in the nineties when they actually wrote scenes that were 7 or 8 pages, which that scene was.
The writing on this really flushes out the characters in such an amazing way. It's really interesting to see where they go because you care about them so much.
Maggie Q: Thank you so much for saying that. Richard would be so pleased to hear that because he really did nail that. He also cared about the relationship so much, and I think because we all did. Sam and Michael, myself and Richard and Martin - we really were all on the same page.
Martin was like, "Listen, if I watch another action movie with no heart and no depth and no story and no arcs and no real characters? I am just going to lose my s***." He's sick of it. He's so sick of people not going for it and not building real charters. It's one of the things that irritates him the most. So, he was hellbent on making sure that we had something, and thank you for saying that, where there are characters that people actually are invested in.
Key Release Dates
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The Protégé
Release Date:2021-08-20
