Adria Arjona Is Embracing Her Badass Era

A24. Gillian MacLeod/MH IllustrationEntertainmentMovies & TVAdria Arjona Is Embracing Her Badass EraThe 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.By Evan RomanoPublished: Sep 04, 2026 8:30 AM EDT11 min readWHEN 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. We’re not talking about a movie magic trailer park constructed within the luxurious confines of a fancy movie studio’s backlot, but, rather, a real, actual, trailer park, one that was a little bit run down, and probably on the precipice of being thrown away—that is, 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 central to the types of movies that Wingard—known for making down-and-dirty flicks like the home invasion thriller You’re Next and two outings in the Godzilla x Kong sandbox—makes. Onslaught is a return to form for the director, a compact story that centers on Celeste (Arjona), a former Marine defending her home and community, which includes 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, back 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, as 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, yeah, plenty of fake blood.AGC StudiosArjona with Glen Powell in Hit ManNaturally, Onslaught does feature a whole lot of blood—and Arjona found herself covered in it often. Making movies isn’t always a perfect science, though, and so 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 made needed to be changed, but the key was figuring out how to change it so that it wouldn’t freeze, but would still be 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 we can expect from The Thomas Crown Affair and Man of Tomorrow. A24The villainous super-soldiers in director Adam Wingard’s Onslaught. MEN’S HEALTH: Onslaught is the latest of many exciting genre-focused projects you’ve done. What is it about badass action that draws you in? ADRIA ARJONA: Because I want to be a badass. I'm very opposite to all of those characters. I mean, I am and I'm not in different qualities, but 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. I like that part of it.In Andor, being able to play such a strong woman, a mechanic… I like characters who are useful with their hands or their body in some capacity. And honestly, it's just fun. The hardest part about being in this genre is finding the emotional thread, and not just being this badass and falling into these stereotypes. That's where the challenge comes in, and that's where I get to have the most amount of fun, and hopefully people enjoy that.MH: Like many of Adam Wingard’s other projects, Onslaught does veer into the horror space. Do you have any kind of relationship with that genre? Are you scared? AA: Man, I’m scared [Laughs]. I mean, I love the genre, and I've played in it a couple times. My first movie I ever did was The Belko Experiment, and that falls in that category. There are just so many brilliant filmmakers making really interesting choices in that genre that I think as an actor you're like, "Man, I’ve got to jump in and play." Getting to work with Adam Wingard, and being in a script that James Gunn wrote? That part of the genre is what I like. And to be honest, it's kind of made my career. Sci-fi, and falling more into the genres, has allowed me not to fall into any stereotypes as a Latin American.MH: Adam has put badass women at the front of his movies in the past. Did that history make you want to get involved? AA: Absolutely. I mean, I was a big fan of You're Next and The Guest. I watched them in my own time, really enjoyed them, and then rewatched them when I was going to go meet with him. I had read this script and… You read an Adam Wingard script, and you kind of envision what he has in mind. But when you meet him, he really allows you to get in his brain for a second when he's telling you how he sees the movie.It was fucking fascinating for me. I was like, "You are out of control. You are wild. You're crazy. And I want in." And we had so many conversations. The first meeting we had, he wanted me to do it. I was like, "Dude, you're going to have to explain the script to me," because it was just so wild, and so fun, and it had so many elements. It had the action element, then it had the mother-daughter element, and then it had the community element in the trailer park. And then it had this high-above conspiracy theory, kooky element that he wanted to represent in the film too.I was like, "How are you going to tie all of these together visually?" Because something is reading it, and the other thing is pulling it together visually. And it was the most fascinating hour and a half of my life. I was like, "Not only do I want to be in it, I want to watch this movie."A24Arjona as Celeste in Onslaught. MH: Did everything come together how you imagined it? AA: Oh no. My brain—my imagination—is nowhere near Adam Wingard's. That guy is a master at his craft. I guess my imagination is limited compared to his. He's in tune with something else.MH: You’re covered in fake blood for a lot of this movie. Do you ever get used to that, or does it always feel weird and crazy? AA: [Laughs] It always feels weird and crazy. You just randomly take a look at yourself in the mirror and you're like, "Whoa, holy shit." You forget about it when you're in it, once the blood wouldn't freeze. If not, it was really uncomfortable. But then you just kind of forget.MH: The avenue to all that blood is through all the various stuff you do throughout the movie, between Marine training, shooting guns, using a chainsaw. What kind of prep did you do to make sure you knew how to do everything properly? AA: I had a great stunt department. A lot of them were ex-Marines. And we had an amazing prop master who was also our armorer on set. His name is Brett, and he's the reason why I look cool in this movie.He would call me “kid” all the time, which I loved. He's like, "What up, kid?" And he would make sure every movement felt organic, and felt truthful, and felt badass, and looked cool. But prior to that, I mean, chainsaws are really heavy. Sniper rifles are really heavy. So, I was dealing with a lot of machinery that was heavy, plus it's cold, so you have to maneuver everything a little bit differently. It's just harder. So, I had to do a lot of weightlifting before, and then I obviously went to a range, and I was shooting. I also played around with a chainsaw here and there, which was so cool.I've always been very afraid of guns, because I haven't been educated in them. I still am very scared of them. They hold a lot of power. So, I really wanted to make sure I was well-trained and very educated. Obviously, there was nothing coming out of the gun, but I wanted to also recreate the movements, the extra shock when you shoot. Those were all acted, because we didn't want to use any sort of real ammunition on set.MH: Did any part of that process stand out as the most challenging? AA: For sure. In the opening of the movie, where I shoot a bunch of pumpkins—that's the only live ammunition in the whole movie. And being able to do that felt pretty badass, not going to lie.But because I'm in a field, and there's no humans around me, and it's literally just pumpkins, it felt like the coolest thing in the world. But once people got around, I was like, "I don't want anything coming out of this gun." And I just had to fake it. There were certain times where we had to shoot it again, because I forgot to do the recoil. Because you're screaming, shooting a line, and then you're like, "Oh, fuck, the recoil. Damn it!" It was a lot. But it was a choice, and I think that's pretty cool.MH: Onslaught has such a cool ’80s vibe, from the synthy soundtrack to some of the posters and even some visuals and aesthetics within the movie itself. Did you have any specific ’80s references while in production?AA: Oh my God. I mean, Sigourney Weaver was all we spoke about. She's an icon in this genre. That was our north star. We referenced a lot of Terminator, a lot of John Carpenter movies, Alien. That's the world Adam kept me on.And then the soundtrack, funny that you speak about it, because they sent me … Well, Adam had most of the music already, so I was able to listen to the music the night before I was filming a scene. I sort of knew what the rhythm of the sequence was before filming a scene. Normally you never really get a rhythm with it. You just perform, and somebody matches your rhythm. But it was interesting to have music and just follow along.We did that same thing we did in Blink Twice, in that big walk that [co-star] Naomi [Ackie] and I do. We did it, and [director Zoë Kravitz] played a song, and we weren't strutting. And then I was like, "Can you please play Beyoncé?" Me and Naomi were both like, "Play Beyoncé, play Beyoncé." And then she played Beyonce, and all of a sudden we're like, boom, boom, and just fell into that rhythm. And then we got so lucky that Beyoncé agreed to lend us that song that we originally randomly picked on the day.Amazon MGM StudiosNaomi Ackie and Arjona in Blink Twice.MH: To that same end, I’ve now watched the Thomas Crown Affair trailer several times. Did you take anything from Onslaught to that experience? AA: It's like two completely different worlds. The way that Adam films is really practical and quick, and you get into rhythm really fast. When I showed up to Thomas Crown, I was ready. I had just worked with a director who was like, "Bam, bam, bam, bam." He knew every shot, he knew everything.You show up to an Adam Wingard set prepared, but also so open to collaboration, because there's nobody more generous than Adam. What I took from that was the rhythm. We shot this movie in, I think, 30-something days. But when I got to Thomas Crown—Thomas Crown is a really big movie, a lot bigger budget. So the pace is slower, you're shooting less scenes a day. I was like, "What is everybody doing? Oh my God, aren't we filming?" So, I brought, I think, that rhythm of working really fast and coming from the indie world, even though it's an A24 movie. But I think Thomas Crown was very much an experience of its own. I love that movie, and I can't wait for people to see how Michael killed it, not only as an actor, but as a director. I think people are going to be very impressed.Amazon MGM StudiosArjona with Michael B. Jordan in The Thomas Crown Affair.MH: Onslaught ends in an open-ended way. Is this a world you could see yourself returning to? AA: Absolutely. I told Adam, "You have no choice. I want to be in every single one of your movies. That's it. I'm in, even as an extra." I think people will be playing Where's Waldo with me in Adam Wingard's movies, because I'm going to be there. As an extra or somebody. I don't know, but I'm in. I really hope that this world keeps expanding, because I have questions.MH: One more question about the future. I know you're not going to say too much about Man of Tomorrow, but you mentioned working with James Gunn earlier, and I know you guys have been friends for a long time. What has it been like reuniting with him after spending time in all these different genre spaces? AA: He's just the coolest dude. I mean, he's a mastermind. He's brilliant. I love it, because I think when you come into a project, you're like, "Oh, how's everybody going to be? Hi, nice to meet you." You're building relationships. And this is my first time where I already have that relationship. We've already worked together. What I'm realizing is just full trust. There's no building of the trust. The trust is there, and starting a new job and being like, "Yo, I trust you blindly," is really exciting and really beautiful. I love it. I love the fact that I can just show up to work, and trust, and have no doubt, because I know that he's got my back.This interview has been edited for length and clarity.Buy Onslaught Tickets HereEvan is the culture editor for Men's Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn't.