A24. Gillian MacLeod/MH Illustration
The gritty action-thriller Onslaught marks the actress’s latest foray into a zone where she can kick ass and take names. “When you get to play this very powerful version of yourself, you can fake it a little bit more in your real life, and it’s contagious,” she says.
When Adria Arjona showed up on set for Onslaught, A24’s new horror-thriller-action film from director Adam Wingard, she arrived at a trailer park. Not a movie-magic trailer park constructed within the luxurious confines of a fancy studio’s backlot, but a real, actual trailer park — one that was a little run down, and probably on the precipice of being torn down, if it wasn’t going to be the setting of an exciting new movie. “There was one trailer we weren’t allowed to get in, because it was dangerous,” Arjona says on a Thursday in mid-August. “These were not nice.”
That lived-in grit is central to both Onslaught and the scuzzy, exciting thrills that have become a hallmark of the types of movies Wingard makes. Known for down-and-dirty flicks like the home invasion thriller You’re Next and two outings in the Godzilla x Kong sandbox, Onslaught is a return to form for the director. It’s a compact story that centers on Celeste (Arjona), a former Marine defending her home and community — including her young daughter — from a trio of violent super-soldiers who broke out of a corrupt government lab. The film is a covert spinoff to Wingard’s cult favorite The Guest, which, when it was released in 2014, dared to ask audiences a vital question: “What if Captain America was an evil killing machine?”
Arjona is no stranger to out-there stories in exciting worlds. In recent years, she’s put her action skills to the test in Zoë Kravitz’s dark thriller Blink Twice, made audiences laugh and put them on the edge of their seats in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man alongside Glen Powell, and played one of the galaxy’s most impressive and badass women in Tony Gilroy’s masterpiece Star Wars series Andor. And that’s just the beginning — next year she’ll appear as the female lead in the new version of The Thomas Crown Affair (alongside star and director Michael B. Jordan) and in a mystery role in Man of Tomorrow, the Superman sequel from her friend and past collaborator James Gunn. As she’s progressed through her career, so too has her résumé of roles featuring action, thrills, and plenty of fake blood.
Arjona with Glen Powell in Hit Man. AGC Studios
Onslaught does feature a whole lot of blood — and Arjona found herself covered in it often. Making movies isn’t always a perfect science, and processes of trial and error are to be expected. Early on, in the midst of shooting an action sequence, the 34-year-old actress found some issues that needed to be sorted out.
“It was so cold. It was so cold,” she says. “I had blood all over my body, and the blood is made out of water, so it would freeze. I would get frostbitten on my face, on my body.” The way the blood was formulated needed to change, but the key was figuring out how to change it so that it wouldn’t freeze while still working as a practical effect on screen. The solution was to dilute the fake blood by mixing it with oil — but there was one more issue that needed to be figured out.
“He needed the blood color to be exactly the same color as what Tarantino used in Kill Bill, because he thought that was the coolest thing in the world,” Arjona says. “Everything was like, ‘The color must be perfect.’ And we got it.”
As Onslaught arrives in theaters and Arjona continues to embrace the world of gritty, grimy, no-holds-barred action, she spoke to Men’s Health about what’s so appealing about being a badass on screen, learning how to wield all sorts of weaponry to take on bad guys, and what audiences can expect from The Thomas Crown Affair and Man of Tomorrow.
