Fast Five may have had the most satisfying Easter Egg ever (sorry, Nick Fury) when Eva Mendes showed The Rock a file on her suspect, and it was Letty. Letty’s death was Dominic (Vin Diesel)’s motivating factor in Fast & Furious, but I never bought it. Letty wouldn’t go out like that. I thought it had to be planned all along for her to bow out and come back, but I was wrong. Michelle Rodriguez herself said that it was Vin Diesel who heeded the call to bring Letty back.
“Vin was hearing out the people,” Rodriguez said in a roundtable interview for Resident Evil: Retribution (a franchise which also brings her character back from the dead) at San Diego Comic-Con. “The people, it was a petition. It wasn’t the studio. It was the people. People were like, ‘We want Letty back, we want Letty back. Dom and Letty, Dom and Letty.’ They made videos and sh*t online. He saw them and he was like, ‘Hey studio, check this out. I think that you guys made a little boo boo. Let’s try it out with her back.’ I think that’s really what happened.”
Now that Fast and the Furious 6 is going into production (we still suggest Furious Six as the title*), Rodriguez is excited for the potential, and hopeful the script and contracts will all work out.
“I am really excited for Fast Six. I really hope that we can make it happen. For me, the beauty of the franchise is this cultural unity. It’s kind of like if you look at the Resident Evil cast. I love that. I love it when you bring different cultures together and make a really awesome movie that entertains people and you don’t talk about the fact that you’re different from each other, kind of like Star Trek. Star Trek I think started that sh*t a long time ago, but now outside of the sci-fi world and in a realistic realm which is the action film world, I’m hoping that this film does justice to that because that’s what I’ve always loved and admired about the franchise is creating iconic imagery of cultures from around the world and unifying them in a movie that people actually enjoy. Hopefully a blockbuster movie that people enjoy, but it’s a hard process, man. It’s a fricking hit or miss. At the end of the day I’m not going to lie. So I’m just crossing my fingers and hoping that everybody’s got their game hats on.”
Now maybe Rodriguez can come back in sequels to every film where she died. “I’ve been doing this sh*t for 13 years and after a while of killing me off, people realized, ‘Hey wait a minute, an independent girl who doesn’t rip her clothes off isn’t that bad after all.’ I’m like a phoenix, man.”
Rodriguez is also excited to be at Comic-Con. She’s walking the floor looking for a property she can buy. For any indie artists out there, here are her criteria:
“I’m really just itching to hear of a cool f*ckin’ kickass bitch that I can play, a cool superhero. I’m always wishing that somebody will come up and be like, ‘There’s this awesome sick fricking comic book character that’s vigilante, so cool, so independent, so generation me. You’ve got to check it out.’ Hasn’t happened yet but I’m waiting for it.”
We don’t know when we’ll be back with more Furious Six news because we live our lives a quarter mile at a time.
*[Editor’s Note: Or Six Fast, Six Furious.]
