Zazie Beetz joins Geek Girl Riot from BlerdCon 2026. We talk about female rage, revenge, Lady Snowblood,1 Rosemary’s Baby,2 and the big samurai-styled action in They Will Kill You. That’s her upcoming action-slasher written and directed by Kirill Sokolov (Why Don’t You Just Die!) with co-writer Alex Litvak (Masters of the Universe 2026 story writer):
Sherin Nicole: Hi Zazie, So I want to talk about female rage because that’s so big in this film. What was the joy or the thrill of enacting that out and really venting that?
Zazie Beetz: Hi, yeah, it’s incredibly cathartic, incredibly empowering, honestly. I think along with all the stunt work and also the emotional drive of Asia throughout the film, which I don’t think I can like.
I’m not supposed to really talk about, but she has this goal. She’s very sort of singularly focused, which is what allows her to… She kind of goes against, I think, someone for instincts, but I think it’s this emotional driver is what gets her through and gets her also through her own anger and her own traumas. And for me…
Playing that is, and to the extent of doing that every day for months on end, very exhausting, that high energy. But it also is so cool to realize like, oh, I can do these things or I can fight and I can fall and I can take a hit and I can be uncomfortable or I can be tired and still like have this energy.
I have to say I was very empowered by that experience. And yeah, to play into this full 10 out of 10 energy every day, for sure.
SN: Yeah, I feel like if Rosemary from Rosemary’s Baby actually existed, you kind of took revenge for her.
ZB: Oh, I love that. Yeah, Rosemary’s Baby was a big… Probably, obviously, there was a big inspiration for this movie.
SN: You can see it. And it’s like, what if Rosemary said, no, I’m not going to.
ZB: Yeah, F this.
SN: So I know people will be thinking about ‘kill count’. Do you have one?
ZB: I don’t, actually. No, I don’t have one. It’s a big building for many people, so—
SN: But it was good to see. I had people texting me like, this is your movie.
ZB: Oh, really? This kind of thing?
SN: Oh, I love it because you’re almost like a—and even with your lighter—you’re almost like a rōnin3, like a, you know, like a lone samurai.
ZB: Yeah. That’s forced to kind of fight this battle. Yes. So I love that. Okay. Because that’s a huge, that is a huge inspiration, kind of this lone warrior who was given.
A big, big, big person who in character was Lady Snowblood. I had her all over my trailer of her having a very singular focus. Her whole life’s purpose is this one focus.
And yeah, this like lone entity going into into this volatile world, but to fulfill her goal. And I love that you picked up on that.
SN: I wonder, though, because you’ve done action roles before, but this has to be like bruises every night.
ZB: Yes, it definitely out of everything I’ve done for sure was the most intense also I think just because of sheer volume like you know I did a lot in Deadpool and that was an intense experience but I’m not in every scene of that movie, you know, and so I had my fortune but in this one I’m just more heavily featured so I’m just doing more work because [it’s your movie] which is really special and was also exhausting but was also very—
Yeah, it was incredible. I had a great group of people. Everyone was really sort of supporting each other. The stunt team was great, and the director was just so passionate about this. It just gave me a lot of energy. But it definitely is not just physically. I think people often think it’s physically exhausting, but it’s mentally really tiring, especially the stunt work, because you’re kind of often, you’re always recalibrating. You’re always, you’re learning choreography. You have to accommodate and accommodate for the space [when] things aren’t working.
To change, like between every take you’re learning new things…how’s it going to work for this angle and then you do it from a different angle so the fight actually has to be kind of different like it’s it’s a very mental thing and so that’s being very exhausting too.
SN: I could totally see that. My last question for you is: You talked about journaling your characters. [Yeah] Is there like a little something you can give us that’s just yours, it’s not in the script, so it’s not a spoiler, but it’s something you created for Asia?
ZB: Oh, my gosh. Honestly, I should read this journal. I mean, I wrote this back in 2024, the summer. I did have… I’m trying to remember anything that’s specific that isn’t like a spoiler energy. Yeah, I think I had sort of… I mean, this is very bland, but I wrote down a thing of, like, I bake with my mom on Sundays. And, you know, there’s sort of, like, a little bit of, you know, mom drama, I guess, in the movie. And that was something, yeah, of, like, wanting to have, create more memories to then lose them, essentially. And so, yeah, that’s very minimal. I remember one afternoon, I’m like, feverishly writing and like crying, just like getting into the energy of who she is and–
SN: What she’s lost.
ZB: Yeah.
SN: Thank you.
ZB: Thank you. Yeah. Appreciate it.
- “Gory revenge is raised to the level of visual poetry in Toshiya Fujita’s stunning Lady Snowblood. A major inspiration for Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill saga, this endlessly inventive film, set in late nineteenth-century Japan, charts the single-minded path of vengeance taken by a young woman (Meiko Kaji) whose parents were the unfortunate victims of a gang of brutal criminals. Fujita creates a wildly entertaining action film of remarkable craft, an effortless balancing act between beauty and violence.”
from The Criterion Collection
↩︎ - Horrifying and darkly comic, Rosemary’s Baby was Roman Polanski’s Hollywood debut. This wildly entertaining nightmare, faithfully adapted from Ira Levin’s best seller, stars a revelatory Mia Farrow as a young mother-to-be who grows increasingly suspicious that her overfriendly elderly neighbors (played by Sidney Blackmer and an Oscar-winning Ruth Gordon) and self-involved husband (John Cassavetes) are hatching a satanic plot against her and her baby. In the decades of occult cinema that Polanski’s ungodly masterpiece has spawned, it has never been outdone for sheer psychological terror.
from The Criterion Collection
↩︎ - A ronin is a samurai who is not in service to any master or clan ↩︎
