We Can Be Heroes is the upcoming kids’ movie from fan-favorite director Robert Rodriguez and it’s got a star-studded line-up of actors playing superhero parents as well as some wonderful youngins taking on the roles of their children. One such actor is 8-year-old Vivien Lyra Blair who is best known for playing Girl is Bird Box. ComicBook.com recently had the chance to chat with Blair and her co-star Yaya Gosselin about the movie and Blair talked about prepping to play Guppy, the daughter of beloved heroes Sharkboy and Lavagirl.
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“I watched the original movie. I think I’ve watched it three times now,” Blair explained when we asked if she’d seen 2005’s The Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl. “I watched it first when I got the audition, then I watched it when I booked it, then I watched it like halfway through Texas. So, I never watched it before now.”
“I go to a Taekwondo school,” Blair revealed when asked about Guppy’s action scenes. “So, I had trained before it, since I was five. So, actually, on Thursday, I’m testing for my brown belt. And it’s brown, brown stripe, black belt. So, I am super excited and I got to do a lot of that. I did all of my own stunts and yeah, that was pretty cool.”
Pretty impressive! ComicBook.com also had the chance to chat with Rodriguez about the movie and he shared what he loves about Sharkboy and Lavagirl.
“I always wanted to do something again with them ’cause I just love those characters,” Rodriguez explained. “They were like the original little kids’ superheroes. And I didn’t come up with it, my son did, and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s amazing.’ That’s what a kid really loves, empowerment. And why not have shark strength and be half-boy, half-shark, or have the powers of lava?”
He added, “I delivered [Netflix] the script and we came up with a bunch of characters. It was like 16 kids with superpowers, but none of them had shark strength, which I kept wanting to steal from that movie because it was such a good one. It was like we cracked the code a long time ago. That was a good one and the lava one… They borrow Spider-Man sometimes for like an Avengers movie, so I would borrow the parents, have them be parents, that way I can have this little super-kid named Guppy who’s got both of their powers combined. Why not, instead of having two kids with the powers, have one kid with that combined power. So, they let us do that.”
Stay tuned for more from our interviews with Vivien Lyra Blair, Yaya Gosselin, and Robert Rodriguez. You can also watch more in the video at the top of the page!
We Can Be Heroes hits Netflix on December 25th.
