Carano draws a parallel between the nerves she felt on the Haywire set and the nerves she felt whenever she stepped into the ring for a fight.

“They are oddly similar,” she says. “In fighting, you’re going to fight a person who is going to be trying to take your head off, and it’s going to happen in front of all these people, so everything is escalated. You’re hyper-sensitive. You feel everything around you, and then you have to hone in on the person in front of you and everything goes away and you become extremely present.

“Acting is the same thing. You are completely vulnerable; your adrenaline is pumping and everyone is watching you. You have to let everything else fall away and be extremely present with the other actor. That’s what I enjoyed the most about fighting: The conversation that goes on between two people. It’s just really raw and natural.”

One definite advantage to acting: Unlike being in the ring, where a mistake can get you knocked out, Carano was able to do her fight scenes over and over again until everything was perfect.

“When you’re fighting, you have to get it right in one take,” she says. “But on the set, I got to do it until I got it right. Steven surrounded me with so many amazingly talented people who were really open to working with an amateur. Channing and Ewan and Fassbender wanted to do all the fight scenes themselves but not in an egotistical way. It wasn’t about who was going to get the belt. It was about creating the most bad-ass fight scenes that people will love. So even though we were smashing each other into stuff and came away with lots of bruises, it was a ton of fun for me. I got to be really physical and aggressive, and it was totally OK!”