Chloe Moretz, who dons the purple leather suit once again in action comedy sequel Kick Ass 2, talks with View about returning to play the feisty, foul mouthed Hit Girl, what life is like as a young Hollywood star, the inner superhero in all of us, and the difficulties in approaching a character she first played when she was only 11 years old.
I read that sometimes fans come up to you and ask you to punch them in the face? How do you respond?
Er, no. Yeah, I was at a Paul McCartney concert, and they were like, 'Dude, are you Hit Girl?' and I was like, 'Mmm.... hmmmm.... no... yeah', and he was like, 'Oh my God, can you punch me in the face?' I was like, 'Uh uh... Oh, I gotta... there’s a person I gotta go see'. I don’t punch people in the face for fun, although sometimes I want to.
What was it like growing up with brothers, was that ideal training?
That was definitely – I trained for 11 years to get to that. Yeah, growing up with older brothers is one of those things where it’s like, you learn to play, or you don’t play, so you learn to play football, you learn to play baseball and everything else, because it’s just a part of your family, whereas when you grow up with sisters, they’d rather just chill and do other stuff. So you’re roughed up a bit, and you learn to fight back and not to take no for an answer.
What was it like going back to Hit Girl again?
It was weird, because in the first one I was 11, so first of all, as a movie actor to even revisit a character is crazy, because you drop your character off after four months of filming it and you’re gone on to the next film and you revisit the character to talk about it in the press. To actually get into what my state of mind was when I was 11 and see where she would have come from then to now was super weird. Trying to reinvent her, but you can’t really because the character's there on screen. You almost catch yourself going, 'I wish I did that differently in the first one, that way I could do this differently in the second one'.
Having just done that, there’s likely to be a third film, were you conscious of that while filming?
To be honest, we’ll see how well the second one does. People could love it, people could hate it, at the end of the day, it’s a gamble and I’d only do a third one if it really was logical. It needs to be a good script, it needs to be a good director, it needs to be, probably Matthew [Vaughn], I would say to do a third one, because it needs – if we were to do a third one, it needs to fully wrap up the series, and it needs to be a really good note to end on.
Mindy’s story in this is about her giving up her childhood. Do you relate to that at all, growing up in Hollywood?
Not in that way. I relate to her in different ways. I think growing up in Hollywood, I’ve actually had a greater childhood, because I’ve been able to see what I’m learning in my history books, I've been able to go and actually see it around the world, and I’ve been able to experience it first hand, whereas a lot of my friends have only been able to travel for summer to small locations, while I’ve been able to live in London for three years, go to Berlin, go to Bora Bora, go to all these crazy locations, and I’m only 16.
I feel that my childhood has been a lot more immense than most, to be honest. I think what I have in common with Hit Girl and Mindy McCready is, I think, the strength of who they are – not physically, but emotionally. I talk about them as two different girls, in a way, because they are, but the strength that they have as people, is very much how I am in real life.
Do you ever yearn for things like just going to the prom or to the mall?
I’ve done all of them. I’ve done all that. I went to the prom, went to the mall. I’ve done all that stuff, but to be honest, it’s fun, but what I find fun is going to my premieres, that’s my prom night. That’s when I get to dress up and be with the people who support me and talk about the stuff that I love, that’s why I do it. Not not being a normal kid, because I am a normal kid, but not doing the things that – what they look forward to in their year is different from what I look forward to, but it’s equal at the same time.
Your character took some heat in the first film because of her fruity language, and she gets a bit like that again. What’s your response to that?
To be honest, it’s a movie, and I think that the funny bit is that, if you’re going to believe and really be affected by an action film, you definitely shouldn’t go and see Pocahontas, because you’re going to think you’re a Disney princess. If you’re that easily swayed, you shouldn’t be watching any film, because you might go and see Silence of the Lambs and think you’re a serial killer. It’s a movie, and it’s fake, and I’ve known that since I was a kid. That was why I was allowed to do the movie. I don’t run around trying to kill people and cuss. If anything these types of roles teach you what not to do.
Do you think of her as a bit of a role model in some ways though?
In emotional ways, yeah. In the way that she’s strong, and in the way that she conducts herself, yes and no, because I don’t think you should deal with situations with bullies by making them sick, and I don’t think you should beat people up. I think she teaches you that we have an inner super hero inside all of us. You can treat things with a higher form of justice, which is just emotional, being self-assured, which is a problem with most of the youth of all of our countries. The common thing is that none of the kids around my age are self-assured at all, and none of them know who they are. These type of characters are [able to help] people to feel it’s okay to not feel self-assured, but you can figure out who you are at a young age, and not fall on your face doing it.
What was it like playing Carrie in relation to playing Hit Girl?
Very different, very different. I went from being in pig’s blood every night for two months, to having a weekend off, and going straight into my leather, purple outfit and fighting and doing crazy stuff. It was very bi-polar, but I feel what it did for Hit Girl, was that it actually made her more emotional. I’d been doing that serious role for such a time that I had like a big file of emotions that I could just throw into a scene, so it made everything easier access for me. It made Hit Girl more dynamic in a way.