Michelle Rodriguez demanded her 'Fast and Furious' character be rewritten over sexism concerns

• Michelle Rodriguez said her "Fast and Furious" character, Letty Ortiz, was originally underwritten.
• Before signing onto the first film, Rodriguez demanded that her character be rewritten.
• "I'm not going to be a slut in front of millions of people," she recalled saying.

Michelle Rodriguez says she demanded rewrites of the original "Fast and Furious" script to improve the representation of her character, Letty Ortiz.

"The Fast and the Furious," the first film in the nine-movie franchise, celebrates its 20th anniversary this June. Rodriguez is now one of the franchise's central characters, but she and fellow cast member Jordana Brewster told Entertainment Weekly in a new oral-history project about the film's production that Letty Ortiz was originally written only as a supporting player to Vin Diesel's character Dominic Toretto.

"When Michelle read her role, she was like, 'No, I'm not playing that.' And then she changed it completely. It went from a trophy girlfriend to this really layered character," Brewster said.

Rodriguez continued: "It was a reality check for them to realize that the streets don't work like that. You don't just get with a guy because he's hot. There's a hierarchy there. Can that hot guy get beat up by who you're dating? If he can, then you don't date him, because why would you want to lose the hierarchy?

"In order to keep it real, I had to school them: 'I know you guys like Hollywood and all that, but if you want it to be realistic, this is how it really works, and I'm not going to be a slut in front of millions of people, so you're going to lose me if you don't change this.' And they figured it out."

"I remember fighting to get a moment where Letty gets into a fight herself because I felt like you don't sit around and let your boys throw down without getting your hands dirty," Rodriguez added.

"If you don't, then are you just there to model? That doesn't work where I come from. So I fought for that - and then I remember hitting the guy in the face by mistake! It was so messed up. I did the same thing in 'Girlfight' and 'Avatar.' I didn't mean to - I'm just really bad at it."

The film's producer, Neal H. Moritz, said that all of the film's characters were written by men, so it was helpful to have the input of Rodriguez and the other women on set.

"It was nice to have that female perspective and really try and dive deep," he said. "We wanted everybody to be empowered, whether you were white, Black, Hispanic, male, female, didn't matter to us."

In 2017, after the release of "The Fate of the Furious," Rodriguez threatened to quit the franchise if future movies didn't "show some love to the women." She later backtracked on her comments and is set to reprise her roles as Letty in the coming ninth "Fast" film, which is scheduled for a wide June release.