Call it Gina Rodriguez’s hottest role yet.
The actress and her “Deepwater Horizon” co-star Mark Wahlberg spent much of their time on the set of the new disaster film dashing through flames, heat and smoke as they channeled Andrea Fleytas and Mike Williams, real-life survivors of the 2010 explosion on Deepwater Horizon — an offshore drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico — that killed 11 crew members and injured 17.
“It was extremely intense,” Rodriguez recalls. “I’m an adrenaline junkie, so I wanted to do all my own stunts. I did the explosions, I was hit with debris, I had to be thrown, tossed around and dodging the flames.
“We were safe, but you felt the fire on your neck,” adds Rodriguez, who was cleared for all but one of her stunts despite most of the film’s pyrotechnics being authentic, not computer-generated.
“(Director) Peter Berg is all about realism, so he got us in the heat. We were (literally) in the heat.”
Rodriguez’s career has been heating up since she starred opposite Edward James Olmos and the late Jenni Rivera in 2012’s “Filly Brown,” as an aspiring rapper.
” ‘Filly Brown’ was an incredible experience that opened the doors for me,” Rodriguez says.
“The people in the industry were looking at me like they had never seen me before. And that was a blessing.”
The Chicago-born Boricua’s Golden Globe-winning TV role as “Jane the Virgin” came two years later, and eventually led to “Deepwater.”
Her next Hollywood movie will be 2017’s sci-fi thriller “Annihilation” — in which the self-styled adrenaline junkie does all her own stunts.
“Each (opportunity) contributed to the other,” Rodriguez says. “If ‘Filly Brown’ doesn’t happen, I don’t think ‘Jane’ would’ve happened. If ‘Jane’ didn’t happen, ‘Deepwater’ wouldn’t have happened.
“I love each and every one (of the projects) for the push forward that it has given me in my career.”
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