Zack Snyder takes girl-power to a whole new level with this chick flick that is as far from Julia Roberts as you can get. And Jena likes it that way. After all, what other film can offer you violence, singing and dancing and just plain oddness? Well, that would be Sucker Punch!

iamROGUE spoke to Jena at Comic Con and she talked about Snyder and her nickname “Danger Prone Malone”. Fun cast, fun premise, hopefully, it will be a fun flick!

I like the hair… it’s new.

Every day it seems like, I don’t know. [Laughing]

So tell me about your role in Sucker Punch.

I basically play Rocket, which is Abbie Cornish’s [who plays “Sweetpea”] little sister and we are in a mental institution. And for reasons people find out when you watch the film, “Baby Doll” comes in as a new patient, I show her around. She kind of introduces this idea of escape and I sort of salivate at the idea and try to convince the rest of our friends. So, you know, in a nutshell, in a strange way it is kind of about the really extreme bonds of friendship in a very extreme atmosphere that make you sort of bond even more intensely. You are willing to sacrifice for those friendships that you build.

I hear you are one who has a lot of fighting going on. What was that like for you because that seems like very different territory for you?

[Laughing] Totally! It was amazing. I think at first I was like really excited because I was a tomboy and rowdy, I used to have the nickname “Danger Prone Malone” because I’d always walk on hedges and ledges and try and jump over things. And I had this thing where I was like freestyle walking so I was like, ‘Yes, they cast me, like how did they know?” but then I got in to a week of physical training and I was like, ‘Oh my God, I don’t know what I’m doing.’ I didn’t have any strength, I’m a wimp, I’m crying over trying to do a 500 sprint under two minutes, and I was like, I can’t do this.

And then you get into it and you start feeding into it and you find this like – as all of the girls called it – finding the beast, which is getting to this point of understanding you know, here is where you thought your pain threshold was, well actually its way up here. You can learn to push past that first fear of I’m gonna die, and you push past it, it becomes like this exhilaration. So it was just amazingly exhilarating and I found all these different strengths as a woman. To be asked to do so many different things. Not only fighting martial arts, not only using weapons, not only being emotionally on this character, not only doing crazy dances and doing all this… I mean, wow, I’ve never been asked to do so much in a film. It’s like the ultimate dream, you know.

Zack [Snyder] seems to like to make his female characters strong and empowering…

Thank God! Thank God!

How was the experience for you working with him on this role?

Oh God! Beyond meeting him, you know, he’s a visual genius. What I think people really don’t know about him is that he has this amazing gift of collaboration. I feel like a lot of autuers who have this visual style alienate you from that style, instead of inviting you in. And he literally rolls out the red carpet and gives you as many different things and tools and pieces that you can play with. And that’s why he wanted us to be training so much because he wanted to be able to give us these physical tools so we could comprehend the world that we were about to be entering. He gets it. He just gave and gave and gave and his energy – I’m sure you’ve met him – it’s so contagious. Everything is awesome and amazing and he’s got this like, perpetual youth. Like you are working on your twelfth hour and you just want to keep going because he is so excited. It’s addictive if I’m not around it, I miss Zack, I want him here this moment, like if I’m in a traffic jam, and he’d make everything better.

You’ve grown up in this business, and you are still working constantly. What is it about this business that keeps you going?

I don’t know. I think growing up in this business, everyone always has such a negative connotation and I don’t think that they understand the beauty of it. Being ten-years-old and being given a voice is a very rare thing. You know, where adults are actually asking your opinion about things and asking you to formulate your own instead of telling you, this is a textbook, this is a fact. You need to memorize this. What are you going to be? You need to be this. Bedtime’s at this time. And sort of, growing up in that sort of freedom I think allowed me to develop my own sense of self in such a beautiful way.

I wouldn’t want to be in a job that I didn’t have sort of a love/hate relationship with. If everything was easy peasy, I think we’d fall asleep at the wheel. You know, fifty percent of the job is, you know I take it or leave it, a lot of bullshit of course. But it’s that other ten percent that just makes you salivate and dream and not sleep at night because you are so excited to go and create something out of nothing. It’s like an eternal search, you know.

What’s next for you?

I just did a little part in this film For Ellen. So Yung Kim and her husband just did this film Jack and Diane with Bradley Rust Grey… I did a little part in that. M. Blash wrote this other film that Chloe Sevigny star in called The Wait. We just finished that four days ago.