Gina Rodriguez Talks Her Love For Boxing in 'Women's Health' May 2016

Gina Rodriguez gets ready for a battle in the ring in this shot from the May 2016 cover of Women’s Health magazine.

The 31-year-old Jane The Virgin actress opened up about her love for boxing, bullying and her new big-screen movie, Deepwater Horizon. Check it:

On her history with boxing: “Taking photos boxing is not as easy as really boxing. My father was a referee for boxing, so I grew up boxing since I was three. I got the scars to prove it! Which I am not proud of because I do not have feminine hands. But strength � inner strength � the idea that you can protect yourself and never have to use it, the idea that it doesn’t matter what size I am, inside is so strong. Mind over matter is so strong. It’s something you learn in the ring, you can’t give up. To me, it’s interesting, I feel like boxing is very much like acting, except you’re just fighting yourself. You’re not allowing yourself to be defeated, you’re getting up after you’ve been knocked down, and you have to believe that you can win. You have to believe you can win when you get in that ring or else you’re going to get your ass beat. In acting, it’s very similar. To me, it’s always been a nice parallel. I want to be a champ. And there are many champs, I just want to be one of them.”

On how she handles bullying: “I would say for bullying, don’t allow somebody’s words to affect you to a point where your own words can’t speak for themselves. Don’t allow a bully’s thrashing at your side for you to take that knife and continue to thrash at your side. On the contrary, stop it. Stop the whole pain and say, what’s going on with you? And you think it to their family, you think it to their friends around them, and you really look into that. From the age of as young as 5 or 6-years-old, if we can teach them to turn and say: wait, if you’re bullying me, there is something wrong, because there is no way it has something to do with me. I’m not trying to hurt you. If we try to teach kids to look at the perception of bullying, not in one that is self-reflective, on the contrary, self-reflective of the bully, then I think we’d have a lot of people saying, can I help you with something?”

On her upcoming projects: “Deepwater Horizon which comes out…this year, September 30th of this year, was tremendous. I’m not going to say its biographical to a tee, but it’s one person’s account of the incident, and you’re really just looking at the day of the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico which happened back in 2010. You’re looking at the survivors of the incident and their heroic journey through that day and that very sad, very scary, very tragic day. I get to play Andrea Fleytas and she was quite the hero and I feel very, very lucky I get to step in her shoes for a millisecond because there’s no way I could’ve done what she did. That one’s going to be an intense, amazing movie because Peter Berg is through the roof, Mark Wahlberg, John Malkovich, Kurt Russell, just giants around me teaching me so much, and Kate Hudson.”