Frank Grillo Is the Action Antihero We Need Right Now
PERHAPS FITTINGLY FOR someone whose most famous role to date is a Marvel villain, Frank Grillo never wanted to be Captain America. Not even as a kid. Growing up as the oldest of three brothers in the Bronx, his action movie heroes were Charles Bronson, Steve McQueen, and Lee Marvin.
“I’ve always loved antiheroes,” he tells Men’s Health. “I like playing guys who’ve seen both sides of life, good and bad, and are usually conflicted and could go either way, because that’s closer to real life. And that’s where I’ve found myself later in my career.”
Grillo is one of the most prolific action stars working right now. Just try holding your breath and making it all the way through the man's IMDb credits. Actually, on second thought, don't.
In much the same way that a specific generation of audience will have come to the likes of Dolph Lundgren during the reign of direct-to-video actioners in the '90s, so too now are we seeing the emergence of a new kind of ubiquitous leading man in the era of streaming, when a brand new shoot-'em-up, heist caper or alien invasion movie can drop on an almost weekly basis. Frank Grillo is the king of this niche. Even if you've been living under a rock—and it sure has felt like that at times this year—it will have been near-impossible to miss his omnipresence on screens. While the rest of us hit the pause button in 2020 and 2021, he was working at such a pace that you could live vicariously through his many avatars, from Video Game Grillo in Boss Level to Cowboy Grillo in No Man's Land and Space General Grillo in Cosmic Sin.
As of this week, he can add Interpol Agent Grillo to his resume, thanks to comedy sequel The Hitman's Wife's Bodyguard. "I kind of play the straight guy,” he says. “It’s big, funny, lot of explosions, a lot of Samuel L. Jackson and Salma Hayek saying the word ‘fuck.’ It’s 90 minutes where you can forget your life, eat some popcorn and watch shit blow up.” And, unlike plenty of other, grittier Frank Grillo projects, he doesn’t shoot or kill anybody: “I think I punch Ryan Reynolds in the face once," he laughs. "That was fun."
He might be synonymous with big, action-packed movies now, but starting out, Grillo had his eye on a career in martial arts, which remains his first and biggest passion. He started wrestling when he was six, then boxing at 13, before going on to practice Brazilian jiu-jitsu, eventually training with Rickson Gracie for a number of years and earning a brown belt. "I see myself as a fighter who acts, not the other way around," he says.
That love and respect for combat sports is clear in the way he approaches his on-screen work: as somebody from that world himself, he wants to represent martial arts with as much verisimilitude as possible, whether in his Netflix documentary series FIGHTWORLD, or while playing gym owner Alvey Kulina in the hugely popular MMA drama series Kingdom.
It was when he got the role on Kingdom in 2014 that Grillo, already in great shape from two decades of buff bit parts, began to train harder than ever before. "I really notched it up a level, and fell in love with the pursuit of a high level of fitness, where maybe an elite athlete would train that way," he says. "I'd started to get these roles that were really physically oriented, and I wanted my body to reflect that. It’s something people respond to: I’m in my fifties, and can maintain this level of conditioning, and I think people get motivated by that and realize they can do it for themselves."
But for Grillo, it goes beyond having the typical action hero physique. In fact, he eschews any kind of workouts that target the "vanity muscles," keeping his focus on the strength and speed that will aid his fighting technique. "I have to have time to train, it’s a very important part of my life," he says. "And not just my physical life. My emotional and mental life depend on me being able to work out."
This dedication to his personal fitness, combined with his martial arts expertise, has been a boon to his professional life. He can work closely with stunt coordinators because he understands the "language of fighting," and does all of his own on-screen fights, as well as the majority of his other stunt work. "Look at guys like Tom Cruise; he puts his life in peril every single movie that he does," he says. "And the result is, you never have to cut away from Tom Cruise, his face is always on screen because he’s doing it all. That, to me, is as much fun as acting."
Not that every job Grillo takes involves throwing himself out of windows or beating up bad guys. He recently had a recurring role on season five of the Showtime drama Billions, in which he switched up his action hero persona to play Nico Tanner, an up-and-coming (but still ripped) artist who gets tangled up with Damian Lewis’ antihero Bobby Axelrod. “I was taken aback by how positive people were, and how much they love the show,” he says. “It was fun to subvert what you would imagine an artist to be like; a lot of us think of artists as maybe small, quiet, and kind of weird, and they’re not. I have a bunch of artist friends who are like bikers. It was fun to play against type, but still there was an element of the street in Nico.”
Of course, to hordes of Marvel fans, Grillo will forever be known as Brock Rumlow, a.k.a. Crossbones, the double agent who went toe-to-toe with Chris Evans in an elevator in 2014's Captain America: The Winter Soldier. But he’s the first to admit that he knew nothing about Marvel going into the project—and was equally clueless as to how it would alter the trajectory of his career.
“When we shot The Winter Soldier, the MCU was not yet what it is now,” he says. “The Russo brothers were these unproven sitcom directors. It was still a big movie, and Marvel was coming into its own, but I didn’t know Chris Evans. When we were doing it, we realized this was going to be something big, but I don’t think anyone realized how big it was all about to become. I still think The Winter Soldier is one of the best Marvel movies. It’s a great movie, period.”
Despite being killed off in the subsequent Captain America: Civil War, Grillo’s character made a surprise appearance in Avengers: Endgame thanks to some time-travel shenanigans—and he’s coming back yet again this summer, this time in animated form, in the animated What If…? series on Disney+. “Marvel changed my life,” he says. “So when they call, I’m just like, ‘tell me where to show up.’”
From comic book villain to a stint on a cult TV show, Grillo never stops working, something he credits to finding success relatively later in life. “I’m a blue collar guy, and I came up in this business hearing ‘no’ a lot," he says. "Now that, over the last 10 or 12 years I’ve had more opportunities to do a lot of things, I don’t want to stop. I just love to work; to collaborate with new people and tell different stories and challenge myself. I will keep working for as long as people will keep hiring me.”
When he says that he never stops, he means it quite literally. Even during the pandemic, he kept going, hiring a team of doctors so that filming on the upcoming Copshop, a movie he's producing and stars in alongside Gerard Butler, could continue safely. He saw the whole thing as a learning experience, and a way of preserving his mental health, during what was a deeply challenging time.
“I do try to stop and recharge, though,” he adds. “Sometimes you get a little run down, I try not to do that. As I get older, I find it gets harder to recover from that." No matter how stacked his work and training schedules are, he always makes a concerted effort to spend time with his girlfriend, an equally busy actress who he chooses not to name. That constant juggling might not be easy, but he believes it's crucial. "You have to maintain your life, your relationships, and you’ve got to make an effort in all parts of your life to find some semblance of normalcy, otherwise you tend to get unbalanced.”
At this point, it would be easy to assume that Grillo has done every kind of movie and worked with everyone he wants to, but there is still plenty that he is keen to do—and he has one dream project in particular that he plans to make a reality in the near future. “I would love to do a biopic,” he says. “It could be anyone; if it was age-appropriate and I could pull it off, maybe it would be a fighter or an athlete, it could be a gangster. I’d just love to play someone who really lived, someone of historic relevance, and complex enough to force me to go deeper than I ever have before."
With five more movies slated for release over the next year, and plenty more in the pipeline, including reprising the role of Leo Barnes in a return to The Purge franchise, it's safe to say Frank Grillo will be on our screens for a long, long time to come.
“I’m just staying busy, and hopefully some of these movies are good,” he says. “It’s the law of averages, right?”
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