Interviews conducted by and copyright Edward Gross
Chloe Moretz, who will follow the reprisal of her role as Hit-Girl with the remake of Stephen King's Carrie, points out that the three years between Kick-Ass films has represented an opportunity for true growth in herself and the character of Mindy.
"The obvious difference is that I'm older now, and the difference between 11 and 15, which is how old I was when we finished, is that you're a different person, obviously," she offers. "You're calculating more ideas, you're experiencing more things in your own life, you're not just living through other people's eyes, you're making your own decisions. So I was able to step into the sequel knowing that after the first movie I was able to have such an amazing career. I've been able to do such amazing, emotionally stretching things that I didn't just want to do a role like the first one. The first one was great for an 11-year-old, but now I'm older and I want to try something I can sink my teeth into. What Jeff and I really wanted to improve was the real heart of it, because I wanted to show that this girl didn't have a father anymore and how much that affected her. She's really confused and going through the self-torture of, 'Am I killing people because this is what I was raised to believe was a good thing, or am I just murdering people?' I wanted to show this inner pain and struggle, and the fact that she's lost her only family, her father. I wanted to show this darker side to her, and I also wanted to make the action a little bit different. So we basically scrapped the guns. I do use guns a little bit in the movie, but we basically do hand-to-hand combat and it's just a lot more hands-on."
For his part, Wadlow elaborates, "Mindy is a fascinating character. Dave is her access point in the first film — he's the regular kid who wants to be a superhero — and that's totally relatable. Here's this little girl who is basically raised to be an assassin; by this man who is insane. I mean, Big Daddy is treated like a hero in the first film, but in our film we even take a step back and say, no, he loves his daughter and that's a good thing, but he was totally crazy and he robbed her of any kind of normal life. We try to deal with that in a very real way. What does that mean for her? So even though she's changed a lot physically between the first and the second film, her emotional growth has been stunted because of this childhood. That's where we stand in the second movie where we have to deal with the fact that she is stuck in this superhero mentality. When we start at the beginning of this film, emotionally, she's right where she was at the end of the first film. She's Hit-Girl and she's going to high school and pretending to be Mindy McCready, but she believes she really is a superhero, and in our film she's confronted with the harsh reality. At some point she's going to have to figure out who she is or she's never going to have a normal life."
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