Sinister Seven: Julie Benz (Part One: Rambo)

Rambo, along with G.I. Joe and the A-Team, were the cornerstones of my violent childhood fantasies. Do you remember how many stores were selling the Rambo 2 survival knife after that sequel came out. I can’t friggin’ believe how many kids my age had those dangerous, and usually cheaply made, knives. Christ, what were my parents thinking? Those were the days…

Anyhow, as childishly cartoonish as the sequels are, First Blood is still a great film. I remember being excited about seeing the cliff in North Vancouver where they shot the big helicopter scene. Add nostalgia to the mix, plus the jaw-droppingly gory trailer, and you can see just why I’m so excited about another Rambo sequel. It make me wanna wrap a red headband around my heart (immediately followed by blowing something up with an exploding arrow, of course).

Tomorrow I’m going with a bunch of guys to watch the new Rambo, followed by beer drinking and dinner a BBQ joint. We’re calling it Operation: Re-Masculation. I hope to eat large chunks of red meat off the end of a hunting knife and trade punches with my inner manly man.

That said, I jumped at the chance to interview Julie Benz, who co-stars as a missionary in the movie, and is best known as the evil Darla on Buffy and Angel or the anything but evil Rita on Dexter.

Benz gives us the scoop on what may very be the bloodiest action movie ever made. (Next week I’ll run another interview with her so we can cover her non-Rambo, more horror-related stuff)

Judging by the trailer, Rambo’s a total gore-show. Would you agree?
Sort of. First and foremost it is entertainment and it is an action movie. Sly just wanted to go for it, no holds barred. A lot of what’s shown in the movie is a watered-down version of what’s really going on in Burma, the atrocities in that country, human rights violations and all that; you couldn’t show what they do there. … [Stallone] basically wanted to make – I don’t want to say an old fashioned action movie because it’s so much more than that. It’s not CGI’ed, it’s not all slick. It’s action-packed, it is bloody, it is violent.

No CGI? Are you saying Stallone really murdered all those extras? Holy crap!
Ha ha, that’s movie magic. It was quite disgusting watching that filmed.

Is it true that you did most of your own stunts for the film?
I went in for a meeting with Sly, who said it would make for a richer film if I would at least try to do my stunts, that it’s a richer film if it’s my face hitting the dirt, if the audience can see me do it.

So what was the most death defying thing you did?
There’s quite a few. To have a building explode right behind you – you don’t get to rehearse that. They walk you through all the possibilities of what could happen, what they expect to happen, what could go wrong, what could possibly catch on fire, where your safety zone is and who’s standing by to help you if something should go wrong. And that gets your adrenaline going. To have to act a scene and then have a building explode right behind you and not anticipate it is a great challenge because I’m scared to death. My hair could catch on fire, I could get hit in the head for all I know. They tell you to do what you would naturally do, which is duck and cover basically, and the camera will follow you, but you don’t know what’s going to happen. There was one stunt in particular: I was being held under the water by an actor playing a Burmese guard – that was pretty intense, it really freaked me out because I thought I was gonna drown.

Violence, torture, brutality – when does your character get to go on the offensive?
Not in this movie. … It just wasn’t inherent in my character. There was a scene originally written where I do take a semi-violent action against a character and we decided that it was just out of character for Sarah to do that. She’s a missionary, she believes in humanity, and, yes, there comes a point where you’re pushed, but for her character it would’ve been too extreme.

So, that said, would agree that when pushed, killing is as easy as breathing?
Listen, I got mugged one time in New York and I fought the guy off. Now, I’m not a violent person and I’ve never hit anybody, but when I felt my life was threatened, I fought tooth and nail and got away. I do think we have that fight-or-flight instinct. For me, I have that fight in me. This guy was bigger than me and stronger than me and I fought him off. I got yelled at by the cops. They said, “Don’t ever fight your attacker, just give him what he wants.”

Stallone is such a huge presence in pop culture. Did you develop any insight into him?
The thing that most impressed me is how humble he is. He’s had quite a career; he’s been on top and he’s been not on top. To work with him now, at this stage of the game, he’s extremely humble, and he’s the first person to tell you what movies he did sucked and movies he thinks are really good. He did not want any of us to watch Rambo III, he’s not proud of Rambo III, he’s proud of Rambo and Rambo 2. … And he’s the first person to make fun of himself; he always makes fun of how he looks, how talks, how he’s perceived. Those are things that I was impressed by.