When Adrianne Palicki decided to act in the GI Joe reboot, she was initially worried that her Lady Jaye would end up too sexy to be taken seriously. But the star, known for her roles in movies like Red Dawn and Legion, is happy with how her weapon’s specialist in Joe Retaliation has turned out.
“Jaye is the intelligence in the group. She’s the only female in a group of military guys. There’s another woman in the movie, Elodie Yung, who is the single ninja (Jinx),” explains Palicki, describing her character as strong but not without flaws. “I would say she has bit of a chip on her shoulder. She is constantly trying to prove herself. She has some cracks, sure, and you start to see them when things start to go south,” Palicki says.
Speaking about the boys in the movie, which includes Dwayne Johnson, Channing Tatum and Bruce Willis, Palicki says, “I had a bit of a crush on Willis. John McLane (Willis’ character in Die Hard) was one of my first crushes, so when he’d do that squinty eye look during a scene, I was freaking out a little on the inside. He came onto this project mid-movie. We were all pretty exhausted by that stage. We had seen a lot of each other and he reignited us and added a comedy aspect,” she says.
Palicki had to go through 16 hours of training daily, carrying heavy guns and would end every exhaustive day with a big glass of wine. “I’ve had a few physical roles in the past. I did combat training for Wonder Woman and gun training from Red Dawn; but that being said, we went to New Orleans five weeks before we started shooting and we trained for a good eight hours a day doing gun training. We also did stunt training and physical training to gain muscle and endurance,” she says.
Palicki tells us how she deliberately got herself hurt during shooting, “When I was doing these fight scenes with the guys, I wasn’t getting hurt. I thought, wait a minute, this doesn’t make any sense! In a realistic world, I’d probably be dead, so I need to at least get hit in the face or punched in the gut a couple of times. There was this really cool fight sequence which Jon (director M Chu) was adamant about having. I get the **** kicked out of me, but I end up winning in the end. It’s pretty cool,” she says.
Her earliest memory of G I Joe is fascinating, “My brother was really into comic books and anything he did I wanted to do. I always gravitated towards the female comic book characters like Super Girl and Wonder Woman. My brother and I are writing a comic book right now. It has to do with angels and it’s a very cool and twisted story which we hope to one day turn into a film,” she concludes.