This interview with Carla Gugino has been out for a couple of weeks but I just saw it covered on Just Jared and wanted to talk about it. Carla, 49, is promoting Gunpowder Milkshake, also with Angela Bassett, Lena Headey and Michelle Yeoh. I tried watching it and it was too stylized for me so I didn’t finish it. I know Carla from The Haunting of Hill House and the excellent Gerald’s Game. She was also in the Spy Kids movies, which started 20 years ago and were directed by Robert Rodriguez. Carla was just 28 when she played the mother to children who were 10 and 12. When she asked Rodriguez about it, he said it was fine because his mom had ten kids.
She got injured on her day off earlier this year
“I went on this amazing hike and I was coming down a hill and I broke my wrist really badly,” Gugino tells me from her home in New York City. “I broke all the bones all the way across and then had a bunch of complications because I had to have a bonesetter on. It made me look like RoboCop, but it was a massive metal thing that was literally drilled into my bones that I had to have on for seven weeks. Then it didn’t heal because the bone was pulled too far apart, so I had to have a second surgery seven weeks ago. I now am bionic.”She was playing a mom to preteens when she was 28
This year marks the 20th anniversary of “Spy Kids,” the first film in Robert Rodriguez’s four-movie family-friendly franchise. Gugino and Antonio Banderas played retired spies raising their kids (Alexa PenaVega and Daryl Sabara) when they’d asked to go on another mission. “What’s particularly strange about the ‘Spy Kids’ of it all is I was so young when I did it,” Gugino says. “I was at least ten years too young for the role because I was supposed to have been a spy for ten years, then had two children who were now 10 and 12. I was 28 years old. But Robert kind of said, ‘My mom had ten kids and if we play this right, no one will ever question it.’ I think it only hurt me a little because people did think I was older than I was for a period of time. But I would never have given up that experience. It was such an extraordinary time. It was just this little tiny movie we made alone in Austin and it became a phenomenon that continues.”Gugino doesn’t think a fifth movie will be made anytime soon. “You know, I think Robert has moved on. I actually just saw him recently and we always want to collaborate. I think he did four of them and that was sort of right,” she says.
I got the impression that Carla wanted to call out her old director but was trying to be gracious and diplomatic about it. It makes sense that his mom had kids young so he wouldn’t think it was a big deal. She sounds like it bothered her at first but she shrugged it off and realized it’s part of the business. Women are asked to play grandmothers at 40 and love interests to men 20 years older and more. That’s just the consequence of having men run everything I guess, and hopefully it’s changing. Also, her story about breaking her wrist while hiking was a cautionary tale for me. I’m around her age and also love hiking. One of my friends broke her ankle hiking and had to have surgery. It just takes one wrong move or a loose stone. Then again Brooke Shields broke her leg at the gym so we might as well do what we love.
Photos credit: Avalon.red and Studio Canal SAS via Netflix Press
