Matilda Lutz was 'nervous' in her 'Red Sonja' chainmail bikini. Then she owned it.
SAN DIEGO – Red Sonja has evolved a lot as a character since the days of the 1970s comic books and that unfortunate 1985 Brigitte Nielsen movie. Not everything has changed, though: The “She Devil with a Sword” is still rocking her chainmail bikini armor.
The trailer for the new fantasy action film “Red Sonja" (in theaters Aug. 15 and video on demand Aug. 29), starring Italian actress Matilda Lutz as the title character, even hints to its impracticality, tongue fully in cheek. Sonja is trying to obtain some protection for battle and an armorer shows off what will become her signature wear. “And that protects …?” she asks, dumbfounded, before he answers, “Nothing. The crowd will love it,” followed by a faux sexy shimmy.
“I was obviously a bit nervous about being so exposed on set in a chainmail bikini,” Lutz tells Paste BN before the “Red Sonja” panel at Comic-Con, the San Diego pop-culture festival. But she also felt it was utilized “in such a smart way” in the context of the movie.
Directed by M.J. Bassett, “Red Sonja” centers on the title character, chained but fearless, battling through obstacles thrown her way by Emperor Dragan (Robert Sheehan). She forms an army of warrior outcasts to take on the tyrant and his ruthless bride, Dark Annisia (Wallis Day), and win their freedom.
The chainmail bikini “is used as an element of power that the emperor has over her, like a violence that he's doing to her. But then she owns it,” Lutz says. “It was so liberating to use exposure and vulnerability that you have doing fights in a chainmail bikini, but you're fighting against these soldiers with big armor and you're still winning. It was so fun to do that.”
Before she got the script and auditioned, Lutz didn’t know a lot about Red Sonja, based on the crimson-haired character by Robert E. Howard as adapted into Marvel Comics by Roy Thomas. But Lutz fell hard for her.
“She was everything I wanted in one character: fierce, raw, untamed, badass, but also vulnerable and full of humanity,” says the actress, who's starred in Coralie Fargeat’s survival horror movie “Revenge,” the Justin Timberlake crime drama "Reptile" and the Daisy Ridley thriller "Magpie."
Lutz began reading the modern comics that dug into Red Sonja’s backstory and fleshed out her persona, and sees this film as "the tip of the evolvement of this character," she says. “The one thing that really stood out from the comics to me was that she was a warrior, but she was also a survivor.
"The question was like, ‘She's lost everything, but what is she willing to do for others?’ She kept going. And that's what I wanted to bring to the film.”