Ellen Hollman Reveals What You Didn't Know About Trinity's Opening Scene In The Matrix Resurrections - Exclusive
If you've only watched the first few minutes of "The Matrix Resurrections," you've seen Ellen Hollman. She plays Trinity at the start of the movie, in the old code discovered by Bugs. The scene is a recreation of the legendary opening sequence of the first "Matrix" movie and required a lot of planning and stuntwork. Hollman broke it down for Looper in a recent interview, where she also told us something most of us missed.
Hollman considers 87eleven — the action design team behind the "John Wick" series and "Resurrections" — her family. Her husband works for them, and she's learned martial arts from them for years. "We flipped each other over one another's head for seven years now, in judo," she recalled. "So I'm like, 'Okay, I trust you to put some wires on me.'"
The training took four to six weeks just for the wall flip, and she noted that it takes a lot to be seamless: "Not only do you have to remember all your choreography with fervor, you also have to propel yourself onto a wall, and then at the same exact time you're motivating yourself, they're loosening the wires in order to accommodate your movement, and then you're also jumping onto another wall."
Thanks to all that obsessive prep work, they nailed the stunt in about two takes.
All in the family
Hollman also acknwoldges something important that few would notice: "The main agent that I am fighting in the opening sequence of 'Matrix Resurrections' is Agent Jones, played by Stephen Dunlevy, my husband." Dunlevy has been one of the more prominent stuntmen and stunt coordinators in Hollywood over the past decade and a half, and worked on "Resurrections" as a coordinator. Lana Wachowski was looking for a Big Dude with martial arts capabilities to play Jones, a Venn diagram for which it's hard to find the overlap.
Wachowski eventually decided that Dunlevy could fight his wife and "keep it in the family." He agreed, even though he was working 12 hours a day rigging. "I actually had to practice all the choreo with the stunties," recalls Hollman, "and then Hubby, on his one day off, he and I went to the facility and based just on memory, I taught him the choreography for our sequence. And the only time we actually legitimately went through it was the day that we were shooting it, and he was on a lunch break."
That was all real
There was quite a bit of pressure going into this. "Our sequences were very high-risk because they were practical," emphasizes Hollman. "I really was climbing up the fire escape, hundreds of feet off the ground. I really was being chased by SWAT helicopters in 30, 40 mile-an-hour winds on top of a building, I really was getting clotheslined by my husband going full speed, and then flat-backing. I really was getting the crap kicked out of me, into a full-on scorpion kick, into yet another flat back."
It was a lot of hard work, but for Hollman, the end result was something special: "To have my husband be a part of this legacy with me was something I will forever be grateful for. I'm still pinching myself. I'm going to show the kids someday. 'Oh, look, kids! Look at mommy and daddy beating a living snot out of each other on a rooftop in San Francisco!'"
"The Matrix Resurrections" is now playing in theaters and streaming on HBO Max.