EXCLUSIVE: Cynthia Addai-Robinson & Daniela Pineda Discuss ‘The Accountant 2’
Christian Wolff and brother, Brax return for another intense adventure in The Accountant 2. To promote the film’s release, BeautifulBallad got the chance to hear from two of the stars of the film, Cynthia Addai-Robinson and Daniela Pineda.
Addai-Robinson on what she got to explore about her character in this new film: “I always viewed Marybeth as sort of the entry point for the audience because she’s sort of observing and seeing all these things unfold around her and reacting in kind, and you know, myself as an actor, same thing. I think back to working on the first movie. I was nervous. I was kind of out of my depth in a way just trying to kind of present as if I wasn’t, which I think for Marybeth it was a similar type of situation, and here we are eight years later, when we started on the sequel, and Marybeth has evolved, grown, she’s in this sort of elevated position within the Treasury Department, and for myself as a person and an actor, I felt like I had also grown, and it was like, ‘All right, I’m going to be returning to a situation that’s familiar. I feel a little bit more comfortable, a little bit more confident.’ And so that was really nice for me to kind of feel like, ‘Okay, I’m feeling like I can handle what I’m now getting thrown at me,’ which is, again, this dynamic with Ben and Jon’s characters and just kind of, again, being that sort of, for the audience, that point of entry. So all of their shenanigans, I also got to just sort of bear witness to and be like, ‘All right, these guys are kind of crazy and they’re also kind of challenging my view of how to serve justice really.'”
Pineda on how she would describe her character: “A barrel of laughs. Just a barrel of laughs, all the comedy really.”
On the action sequences in the film:
Pineda: “I would say it was definitely next level. It’s not necessarily a character you see all the time. I feel like it’s kind of changing a bit. I saw a video the other day of these two American eagle chicks in a nest and one of the siblings just takes out the littler one, takes out the nest. I was like, ‘Oh, hey, I know that girl. That’s on ice.’ But at the same time, you want to see that eagle hunt and you want to see that eagle fly, and there is something really compelling about watching a predator do their thing. At the same time, I felt like there’s more to her, there’s more layers there. So she’s not just a stone-cold killer, and it’s the type of roles that I would like to see more women get to play. They’re certainly here in the real world, you know? And I love to beat the shit out of Cynthia. But we were hugging in between takes and it was nice.”
Addai-Robinson:” It is pretty good, and what’s very satisfying is we’ve now sort of had opportunities to see the movie with audiences, and when you hear an audience audibly gasp, then you know you’re doing something right, because it means that the stakes and how invested people are in these characters, they are literally leaning forward, and with each blow, each hit it’s like… So I think that’s like a nice vote of confidence to hear those gasps.”
The Accountant 2 drops in theaters on April 25.
*This interview has been edited for length and clarity
Photo Credit: Warrick Page/Amazon MGM Studios
