The Power Rangers franchise continues to grow with each new season, but during the franchise’s long life there’s still only been one child Ranger. That honor falls to Blake Foster, who played the role of Justin in Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie and Power Rangers: Turbo respectively. Most Ranger actors are younger when they start on the show, but Foster portrayed the part of Justin at the age of 12, and since then there’s not been another Ranger that age introduced in the franchise. ComicBook.com had the opportunity to speak to Foster all about Power Rangers, where he broke down the biggest challenges and most rewarding elements of growing up with the franchise from such a young age.
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“Rewarding for sure, I’ll answer that first because before anything acting-wise I was a martial artist,” Foster said. “My mom and dad got me into karate when I was really young and I was a black belt by the age of 12 and it kept me very humble and grounded, and that’s kind of my foundation, so when I saw Power Rangers the rewarding thing was ‘oh, I get to do Karate on set in front of a camera’, and that was more rewarding to me than anything. Keep in mind I was still a huge fan and loved the Power Rangers.”
Getting to perform martial arts as part of your job is a pretty cool thing, but being so young on set had its challenges as well, challenges that mostly presented themselves during breaks on set. Foster loved hanging out with the rest of the cast, but opportunities to actually do that didn’t happen as often as he would have liked.
“The hardest thing was going to school on set while all the other Rangers got to hang out because they were a lot older than me,” Foster said. “It was very hard for me to get pulled into a dressing room and told ‘hey, it’s school time now for 3 hours’ or ‘on your lunch you’ve got to do school and catch up on some hours’, and everyone else is kind of hanging out because they treated me like a little brother. They really treated me like a little brother and they were all open arms and welcoming and it made me feel very comfortable on set.”
We’ve got plenty more to come from our full interview with Blake Foster (courtesy of Aaron Coney and Hustle Matters Talent), and you can check out our whole conversation with him in the video above.
