On screen, Gina Torres is certainly no pushover. At 5’10”, the statuesque actress has successfully carved out a niche for herself by playing kickass characters in Cleopatra 2525, Alias, 24, Angel, Justice League Unlimited and Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. However, Torres admits she never intended on embodying the lean, mean fighting machine she so effortlessly pulls off.
    “It seems to be the thing that I, and these characters, have in common,” she offers. “The thing that producers or directors pick up on when I walk into a room is ability and strength. To be completely honest, it wasn’t something I started off doing. It wasn’t part of my plan. These roles came up and by virtue of my size and the way I carry myself. It is not just physically that they saw I was able to encompass these women. After all, I am not small.”
    Thus, her current gig as Zoë Washburne in Serenity suits her perfectly. “I don’t want to over simplify Zoë but for me, what was always so interesting in playing her was the part the audience didn’t get to see,” Torres explains. “Underneath all that toughness is this incredibly vulnerable, reluctant heroine and that fascinated me.”
    Based on the underrated and all too quickly cancelled television series Firefly, the show established Zoë as a comrade of Malcolm Reynolds during the Unification War. With the epic battle over, she subsequently signed up as second-in-command on his spaceship Serenity, which makes cargo runs, we well as performing other illegal activities.
    Naturally, Firefly‘s short run derailed many of creator Joss Whedon’s long-term ideas and Torres regrets not having the opportunity to explore that softer side of her hardcase alter ego. ” We saw the warrior side, the capable woman, we saw that she as always there by her Captain’s side, ready and able, and that she loved her husband, but we never got to see her be all woman,” she says. “Whether that was vulnerable or interacting with somebody who was hurt and other lives weren’t at stake at the time, we never got to just be quiet with her.”
    Serenity resumes where Firefly left off, pitting the rag-tag crew against the Alliance who, for some unknown reason, will stop at nothing to retrieve the unstable River Tam. Doing their dirty work is the Operative, a man Torres says “pretty much picks up where the guys with the blue hands left off. He’s scary. He’s a company man. The Operative has no scruples regarding how, what, when and where.”
    In an attempt to shake the Operative and discover the truth behind the Alliance’s obsession with River, the Serenity crew do the unthinkable and navigate through heavy Reaver territory. “When we first hear about the Reavers in the series, not everyone is sure they exist at all because they live on the outskirts of the space that has been colonised,” explains Torres. “And they are madmen who do terrible things. They are cannibalistic and are aberrations of human psyche. Over the course of the movie, we get to learn who they are and why they are.”
    And how deadly they are. Most crewmembers get up close and personal which these abominations which can’t bode well for them. “I don’t know how much I can tell you, but no one fares too greatly against the Reavers,” hints Torres.
    To prepare for such benchmark brawls, the movie’s cast attended Fight Boot Camp, although Torres was understandably AWOL. “I kinda have to stay in shape anyway,” she explains. “I had been working on Alias, so I had been getting back into warrior girl mode when we started doing the movie. It was really about learning each other’s vocabulary and taking it from there. The two biggest fight sequences involve Mal and The Operative and we get to see River bust out a little, so they required the most time.”
    With a plot revolving mainly around Mal, River, and Simon, Zoë doesn’t take centre-stage often, yet her presence is still undeniable. During a heated argument between Mal and Jayne, Zoë steps in as mediator then orders the hot-headed mercenary to leave the room. True be told, this isn’t the first time Zoë has been the voice of reason and Torres acknowledges she frequently plays the mother figure.
    “It is funny that of all the people Jayne listens to, he listens to me,” she chuckles. “This is something Adam established, which is Jayne loves women. Maybe not in the way we want to loved all the time, but he loves them all equally… whores, girls, he loves them all. To him, Zoë is such a combination of so many power archetypes the he loves her despite himself and respects her position and ability. Plus, I think she scares him a little bit.”
    Zoë may intimidate Jayne and have earned Mal’s trust but her heart and soul belong to her husband, the ship’s pilot Hoban “Wash” Washburne. Married to Laurence Fishburne in real life, Torres has nothing but high praise for Alan Tudyk, who plays her wise-cracking hubbie in Serenity.
    “Alan is a great husband,” suggests Torres. “When we call each other, we always leave messages and go ‘Hey it is your pretend wife or it is your pretend husband.’ And my real husband likes him too.
    That is a crying shame considering that a desperate plan involving the Reavers and the Alliance backfires, resulting in one of the movie’s most unexpected tragedies. “It affects Zoë the way it affects most people, but we all deal with grief differently.” says Torres. “Wash was a great light for her and a great refuge from all the darkness in her life that when that light goes out, it’s a struggle not to revert to who she was before he came into her life, which is what Mal is.”
    Under the dire circumstances, Zoë is forced to keep a brave front and move on. In hindsight, Torres would have preferred her character to experience an utter emotional meltdown. “Oh yeah, although she doesn’t,” she confirms. “It seemed like the natural thing to do, that there should be a moment. I’m not saying right at that second it happened, because there is no time, which was shocking and challenging.”
    Wash almost had some company in the afterlife. Due to insurmountable odds, at one point, Death appeared to have everyone on the ropes, especially Zoë. “I was on a ride,” reflects Torres. “We don’t know if we are going to be making another movie. It was a miracle we were doing it at all. We knew all bets were off, so for me, if I went out in a blaze of glory, it would have been just fine., But I didn’t, so that’s really cool.”
    Clearly, Torres enjoyed playing Zoë again, and, more importantly, reuniting with her co-stars. “Being reunited with the cast and then to witness everybody shine, to really take their parts and run was beautiful,” offers Torres. “Just to watch Summer really blossom and Simon and Kaylee do their thing in a way we didn’t get to visit before was so much fun. I was so proud to be a part of it.”   
    With Serenity trying to appeal to a diverse audience, Whedon has his work cut out for him and Torres is confident no one will walk away from the movie disappointed. “The old fans will be really happy to see us again and they, like us, will be excited to reach a place of understanding for where we were heading in the show,” states Torres. “And if they’ve missed us, they get to see us 20-feet fall! For new fans, I hope that they discover something that will stay with them for longer than an hour and a half. Maybe it will even inspire Universal to make another one of these.”