Vanessa Hudgens will probably always be Gabriella Montez from the Disney iconic High School Musical. After she was done singing in the halls of East Side High School, she transitioned to more adult roles. The actress starred in the controversial film, Spring Breakers, alongside Disney alum Selena Gomez. From there, Hudgens continued to create her own avenue by taking the roles she felt fit her image. The actress most recently starred in Bad Boys For Life.
Of course, Hudgens’ character was praised for her no-nonsense attitude and ability to hang with the big boys. What may be surprising is how the actress landed the roles.
Vanessa Hudgens ‘sucker punched’ her way into BB4L
Hudgens recounted how difficult the process of getting roles that weren’t as “innocent” as the singing cheerleader was for her. The actress stated that trying to secure those mature roles was a struggle due to her former image. “In the beginning, it was definitely challenging because that’s all that a lot of people had seen me do,” the actress explained to The Hollywood Reporter. She continued, “So the parts that I really wanted were a fight, but it just made it all the more rewarding when I would get those parts because I know that I earned them.”
Hudgens then spoke on how another role she did helped her step into the character of Kelly in the fourth Bad Boys film. Before riding the streets of Los Angeles with Will Smith and Martin Lawrence, Hudgens starred in the action movie, Sucker Punch. The film, directed by Zack Snyder, followed a young woman who was wrongfully locked in an insane asylum and copes by imaging a fictional and fantastical world. Vanessa Hudgens portrayed Blondie, one of the women that the main character befriended in the asylum. Sucker Punch was a box-office disappointment and critically panned by critics.
Hudgens, however, felt that the experience in Sucker Punch helped her in Bad Boys For Life. “They gave me my gun right before we started filming … and as I inspected this gun to get to know it a little better, I realized I had worked with it 10 years ago on a movie called Sucker Punch. It made me so grateful for the fact that I’ve continuously tried to be in all different types of films. If I hadn’t done Sucker Punch, I would’ve been at a complete loss,” the actress recalled.
The actress killed it as the strong-willed Officer Kelly
When it came to playing the dangerous cop, Vanessa Hudgens didn’t have time to enroll in police school in order to train for the role. Despite that, the actress was able to spend a lot of time bonding with her cast mates, particularly the actors who worked in the undercover operation, AMMO. “We actually did that for our camera tests and chemistry readings together. It consisted a lot more of me saying, ‘Bad [expletive], bad [expletive]…’ It’s supposed to be messy, and we’re all such a motley group of people together that it doesn’t take much for us to sound like an absolute disaster,” she shared.
And of course, Hudgens was in awe to be able to work with Smith and Lawrence, and she even shared the fact that the two A-listers had “huge trailers” on set, which we certainly believe!