We love strong female characters who are completely bad-ass. We especially love female characters who can literally kick ass! Our favorite is Maggie Q, who plays the titular character on The CW’s action-packed spy drama “Nikita.” Populr sat down with actress at the San Diego Comic-Con where she shared some details of the upcoming season and also about the seasons past. During our interview, she revealed her toughest action scene she has ever filmed on the show.
In the first season’s eleventh episode titled “All The Way,” Nikita is captured by Division and makes her escape. “There’s an action scene where Nikita’s on the training floor of Division and there’s thirty recruits there that she has to fight her way through to get to the other side. I thought I was going to die doing that scene,” she told us.
Q also talked about the long hours for this particular scene trying to capture it in one continuous shot. “We wanted to get it all in one take because I do my own stunts. I’m always fighting not to have cuts if we can swing it. The fight went from one side of the room to the other and the camera was on tracks, so we weren’t cutting. We weren’t doing bits so it was me doing this whole fight for seven hours.
“There was a point where I was almost in tears. The stunt coordinator came up to me and asked if I was okay, and I went, ‘I’m not okay, I’m so tired, I want to die!’ It was exhausting. I can’t even explain to you how hard it was.”
With her martial arts experience and with the series now going into its third season, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the fight sequences are getting easier for the star. “That’s endurance stuff. To keep up endurance stuff you have to train like a professional athlete, which I don’t get the time to do,” Q explains. “I would say that my memory and my skill set gets higher but I wouldn’t say that it ever gets easy because I’m the hardest person on me. If something’s not good enough, I’m the first person who’s going to say we need to up the level, make it better and make it stronger and if that involves it being harder then so be it. That’s the level of quality I want to work at and I don’t accept anything less than that.”
The next season of “Nikita” premieres October 19th on The CW.