For Michelle Rodriguez, a career in Hollywood meant much more to her than just a one way ticket out of the ghettoes of New Jersey -- it embodied her chance to change the world. According to the latest gossip news updates, the Girlfight actress tried to quit the Fast and Furious franchise before the first film ever got made because she felt her character, Letty Ortiz, was being treated as Vin Diesel and Paul Walker's sexual prop, instead of person. Cara Delevingne's ex-girlfriend recently explained that it wasn't hard turning down all the offers to get raped in movies, but it is scary to know that the only way you are going to get to play a role you truly love is if you first write the script they're in yourself.
For 36-year-old Hollywood actress, Michelle Rodriguez, it can be frustrating at times dealing with the constant barrage of sexiest scripts that seem to want to portray every woman worth meeting in the world as some sort of damsel in distress, at best.
In an in-depth interview with the Daily Beast, Michelle explains that she only recently came to the realization that she is going to have to take more control of the writing process if she's ever going to make the movies that really interest her as an artist:
"It's been 14 years since I've been the lead in a movie, since I've carried a movie on my own.
"I've kind of made myself a carcass of safety and I've protected myself against playing the 'girlfriend' or 'the girl who gets raped and then gets empowered,' 'the girl who gets empowered and then dies'... they're always taking the power away from the women.
"I've kind of closed myself off to the world out of fear of being taken down, or stereotyped. And in the process, I've stereotyped myself."
Rodriguez told the magazine, that she almost even walked of the first Fast and Furious flick -- going so far as to beg to be let out of her contract -- because she couldn't stand the idea of her badass character having a thing for Paul Walker's milquetoast cop, Brian O'Conner:
"They just followed the [Point Break] format without thinking about the reality of it.
"Is it realistic for a Latin girl who's with the alpha-est of the alpha males to cheat on him with the cute boy?
"My whole point in being an actress is that I thought I got to live a dream...And I don't dream about being a slut!"
Despite the fact that things have hardly improved on the whole for the Black people in America in the last four years that Obama has been in office, Michelle took to Twitter to further talk about women's equality in Hollywood and her hopes that a Hilary Clinton lead future will be better for the fair sex:
"If anything comes of a Hilary Clinton presidency as foolish as it sounds, would be a new found respect for 51 percent of the American population which are women.
"You'd be surprised what that symbolism does Hollywood folk and their investment in the fabric of our culture."
Let's hope that all Michelle Rodriguez future socially conscious projects meet the same success as her latest Fast and Furious 7 billion dollar money maker.
