“Hit Man ”star Adria Arjona reflects on reinvention and role playing with Glen Powell

The "Andor" actress tells EW the film shows "you can become who you want to become…there's not just one version of you, there's so many versions of you."

It didn’t take very long for Adria Arjona to know that working with Glen Powell in Netflix’s Hit Man would go well.

"The first thing that clicked was our love for our families," shares Arjona with Entertainment Weekly, "we have that very much in common." The common value, along with their shared passion for their craft, was why the Andor actress was able to "develop and create these characters and this dynamic" alongside Powell.

In writer-director Richard Linklater’s new film Hit Man, which Powell co-wrote, Arjona plays Madison, a woman in an abusive marriage, who hires and falls for the hitman she hires to kill her husband. One small problem: he’s not really a hitman, but a nerdy college professor who poses undercover to help out the police department.

Netflix Adria Arjona as Madison and Glen Powell as Gary Johnson in 'Hit Man.'

“Just being on set and creating these characters is my happy place and it's his happy place, too,” she adds. “We shared that from the get go. I think that's what really helped us to develop and create these characters and this dynamic. And we both came from a very egoless place. I trust him, he trusts me. We just wanted to make this movie work.”

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Below, Arjona, who can soon be seen in Zoe Kravitz's Blink Twice, tells EW about her experience working alongside Powell and Linklater to create the dynamic for the story, and breaks down that complicated Notes scene.

ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: You've been talking about this movie for a while, so how does it feel now that people are seeing the movie?

ADRIA ARJONA:  It feels so good! This movie first went to festivals during the actor strike, and I couldn't be a part of it. If there's any movie that I want to be a part of, it's this one. It was really frustrating, but it was all due to something bigger than this movie. I was fine with coping with that. The first time I watched it was in Austin and all of a sudden everyone started clapping and my mind was kind of blown. It's just really cool that you spend so much time creating something, dedicating so much time, so much love and passion to something, and to see people react and really love it. It's the reason why we do what we do. We've gotten really lucky with this one, and I'm just so happy that Netflix has really pushed it and supported us.

After finally seeing it with a crowd and hearing people clapping and stuff, what do you feel like people have been responding to most in those kinds of moments?

I think that everyone has a very different experience with this movie. I think this movie has so much in it that it is pretty universal but I do think the role playing element of this movie is something that people were really liking. Just seeing Glen sort of shapeshift into all these different characters so seamlessly and so beautifully, and the same with [my character] Madison, it's the reinvention and the role playing that they sort of do together, and I think, we all in life want. We're constantly growing and reinventing ourselves, and we don't really realize that we're doing it. Hit Man really speaks on the fact that you can become who you want to become…there's not just one version of you, there's so many versions of you. I think people are connecting to that while being entertained and having a good time.

Netflix

Totally. And the way that people can change as part of a relationship or as part of an interaction with someone else. Glen goes through so many different looks in the movie, but once Madison comes in and they're kind of both role playing, shapeshifting around each other, it kind of adds a whole new element to it.

Yeah, it's fun that he is the [stereotypical] depiction of a hitman, and Madison is kind of like the debunking of a femme fatale. That was really fun to do. She's playing what she thinks a femme fatale is, and that makes it funny and ridiculous. She has no idea what she's doing. She's just figuring things out as she sort of goes and playing the idea of the version of a woman that Ron wants. Is she what would he want? What does he desire? Meanwhile he's also lying to her, so it's this kind of funny, ridiculous thing. I think Madison just watched way too many movies.

It’s definitely a movie about being influenced by movies, which is fun. I wanted to ask you about the notes app scene when Glen is wearing the wire and he's talking to Madison on the phone. Richard mentioned that that scene went through a couple different iterations before kind of settling on the notes app. What do you remember about filming that scene or developing it?

Through the rehearsal process and the outline version, yeah, I went through so many iterations and it was one of those scenes that just never clicked. We just fought on and never gave up on that scene. But in order for that scene to work, the scene before that needs to work, which is the breakup where they both kind of reveal who they are to each other and they break up. So then that second scene, the phone scene becomes the makeup sex of their relationship. They're making up and you're watching a couple coming back together while also succeeding in something that maybe morally isn't right, but you're still rooting for them because you really like them together.

Courtesy of Netflix Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in 'Hit Man.'

And then the third scene, their proposal scene. To go from the breakup to the makeup to the proposal, and then to the marriage element of it, which is the end of the scene, it's like till death do us part. So those three sort of had to go together in a way for that middle one to really work.

The way that Rick [Linklater] works, he works like such an athlete, and he really put us through this bootcamp of two and a half weeks of breakfast, lunch and dinner, script and hand rewriting, pitching ideas, restructuring it, rehearsing it. And we just never stopped. So by the time that we got to film these scenes, because these movies didn't have that big of a budget, we didn't have a lot of time to kind of waste on set or to figure things out or to ask questions. We sort of just rehearsed it, rehearsed it, rehearsed it, and then every day on set was sort of game day.

Was it difficult at all? You mentioned how in that scene, your and Glen’s body language and dialogue is out of sync. You're saying one thing, but acting out something different physically, both to Glen and to the audience, did that feel kind of weird or was it fun?

It felt weird when we first started rehearsing it because it was like you're rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time, what is happening? But because we did so much prep work on it, by the time that we did it, we kind of came up with this saying of it was a choreography that we knew every step to. That scene needed two people being symbiotic. And that's sort of what we became.

Courtesy of Netflix Adria Arjona and Glen Powell in 'Hit Man.'

Did you have some input on Madison's characterization or why she's doing stuff during that sequence?

We wrote it, the three of us together. It was really important for Rick to bring me on board and hear my thoughts on Madison. We wrote scenes together. We changed scenes, we changed dialogue. We molded this dynamic together. There’s a lot I had input with but Rick didn't only do this with me, he did this with Retta as well, and with everybody that was in the movie.

For being such a famous filmmaker, he really seems open to collaboration and input from everybody.

I mean, that's his brilliance. His brilliance is how humble he is and how his idea of filmmaking is collaboration as it really should be. He invites you and gives you the responsibility to have ownership over your character. It comes from a very egoless place. Even though he is a brilliant director and a genius, he has no need to prove it to anybody. He makes movies, he goes back to Austin, and he's just really chill and cool about everything that he does in life.

Netflix Adria Arjona in 'Hit Man.'

I’m curious, have you and Glen spoken since the release? It just feels like both of you are kind of really busy right now. Do you guys talk at all about navigating this whirlwind or how it feels to be at such a busy point in your careers?

Yeah, we both do. And I think that's another thing we have in common is that we surround ourselves with the people that we love and that kind of keeps us grounded. But it's definitely been a challenge and a transition. It just allows us to have more say in what we do next and that part is something that we're sharing that is really exciting, that we have the ability of choice. That's something that I think an actor always aspires to and always dreams of, and I'm sort of getting a little bit of the taste of it now. I think that's the biggest gift you can get as an actor. He's one of the real ones that dude, he's really cool and centered and grounded, and he has his priorities straight. I can't wait for what he'll continue to do. This is just the beginning for Glen Powell.

Read the original article on Entertainment Weekly.