“Jade [was my favorite] since I was a kid,” Gabrielle says about her fandom for this world. “When I was young, I would always play as Jade, because, one, I saw myself in her, and two, I’m a Black woman who does karate. I did karate for 12 years, and I also used the bo staff, that was my weapon of choice.”
According to Gabrielle, she never anticipated that she would get to use that skillset in a movie, and yet there she was on set wielding a bo against Rudolph in more than one scene. “It was really fun to relearn, because I did do a different style of bo staff for the film than I originally trained with growing up. It was incredibly difficult, the bo staffs we used for the film were heavier than a traditional bo staff would be, so it was a lot of strain on my shoulder, a lot of finding new muscles.”
Yet it was also finding old ones, and connecting with what Rudolph calls a shared empathy for the characters. In fact, in playing what are essentially estranged sisters in Mortal Kombat II, Gabrielle and Rudolph rekindled a dynamic they had after working together for years on Netflix’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
“When you know someone so well as a person, and you adore them like with Tati, it’s nice to be on set and feel free to not be hesitant about any notes or things you might need, or things you want to give,” Rudolph says. “Having that chemistry there already was nice, because we got to skip the building chemistry and go straight to building character and how do we want to develop this together.”
In the role of their emperor, the imposingly tall Ford (who stands at six feet, eight inches) acknowledges there is a certain amount of pressure about bringing these characters to life in a way fans will recognize. This would include Ford, who’s favorite character growing up was Baraka “just for the pure brutality.” This led to him estimating they spent more time training than they did shooting the movie. Nonetheless, there are some things you cannot prepare for.
“The first day I was on set, I realized how much I was going to sweat in the costume,” Ford says. The costume he is referring to is a prosthetic and makeup wonder that could only be achieved after spending about five hours in a chair to have the armor and accoutrements applied. And then they put a hammer in his reach. “So the sweat is coming out of my hands, Simon is shouting action, and I’m swinging the hammer, and the hammer flew out of my hands and smashed my lights. That was one of the days where you realize you can’t practice or train for everything.”
