Maggie Q has proven she’s one of the best action stars in the business time and time again, but if you’re looking for even more proof, wait until you see her new movie, The Protégé, when it hits theaters on August 20th. Q leads the Lionsgate release as Anna, a skilled contract killer seeking revenge for the death of her mentor, Moody (Samuel L. Jackson), who was also like a father to her. What follows is one wicked combat set piece after the next, with Anna doing whatever it takes to find out who’s behind Moody’s death.
Q recently joined us for an episode of Collider Ladies Night to retrace her steps to The Protégé and, of course, a pretty significant one is her four-season run headlining The CW’s Nikita. Following the 1990 release, La Femme Nikita, and the 1997 TV series, The CW rendition sees Q playing the title character, a woman who’s recruited by Division, a secret government operation that turns her into a trained killer. Ultimately she escapes and sets out to take Division down.
While browsing The Protégé press notes, I caught this quote from Q: “I admit I often find myself always pushing people further in fight scenes than they expected to go.” When asked for an example of an individual she pushed who went above and beyond her expectations, she recalled a significant challenge she faced while working on Nikita. She began:
“When I started on Nikita, we had a certain stunt coordinator, fight coordinator, and I really tried to get what I wanted out of him. You gotta kind of know what you’re dealing with and who your audience is, right? So you can kind of ask and expect something, but then you have to gauge whether this person is capable of giving you that or they’re just not giving it to you, right? Because those are two very different people. And so what ended up happening for me was, because I felt that my expectation was not going to be met, I had to bring on someone who I believed was going to get the job done, and I did.”
Q recruited someone she dubbed “a big movie guy” who agreed to join the show for a year. However, his involvement wasn’t just a one-year Band-Aid. By bringing in someone of his caliber, Q managed to set a new standard for the show. Here’s how she put it:
“I knew I couldn’t keep him because he was a huge movie guy, but what I knew would happen was that if I brought that level in, we’d now set the standard. The bar has been set. We’re gonna go into a second season. I can’t keep him. He’s gonna go on to do like, Sherlock Holmes, all these big movies that he does, and I now have a standard that’s undeniable. And so when we hired in the second season after I lost my guy and he went back to his movies, that’s exactly what happened. I attracted coordinators who were like, ‘Oh, okay. Well, this is gonna be a huge challenge for me,’ and then the guy who ended up coming on and staying with me for the rest of the run of the show, I didn’t know if he could do it in the beginning, but because that standard was set, he was the one who was like, ‘Okay. I know what you can do, I know what you expect, I’m here.’ And that guy became really one of the best assets for the show and that was really, really exciting. I’m so proud of him and I’m so proud of what we did together because it was a grind.”
Eager to hear more from Q? Stay tuned because we’ll have her full Collider Ladies Night conversation for you later this week. We discussed her journey to Hollywood, her experience working on Mission: Impossible III and a whole bunch of burning The Protégé questions that -- trust me -- you’ll want to know the answers to!