The Big Picture

Welcome to a new episode of Collider Forces with
Fallout
and
The Wheel of Time
star Xelia Mendes-Jones.
During his conversation with Collider’s Perri Nemiroff, he revisits leaving football behind for acting, and scoring his first big feature film role in Gareth Evans’
Havoc
.
Mendes-Jones also details the backstories he developed for
Fallout
‘s Dane and
The Wheel of Time
‘s Renna.

If you’ve seen The Wheel of Time and Fallout, there’s a good chance we had a similar viewing experience. The entire Wheel of Time ensemble is fantastic, but Season 2, which dropped on Prime Video from September 1 to October 6, brought in a new standout character, Renna, the Seanchan sul’dam responsible for making it an especially dark season for Madeleine Madden’s Egwene. As terrible as Renna is, you can’t take your eyes off her, and the credit for that goes to the actor in the role — Hollywood newcomer Xelia Mendes-Jones.

Cut to April 2024. Fallout hits Prime Video and becomes an instant sensation. The majority of the season puts the spotlight on Ella Purnell, Walton Goggins, and Aaron Moten, all of whom give powerhouse performances. With only eight episodes, a bunch of curious locations, a number of key factions to establish, and quite a few complex agendas unfolding, how does an actor with minimal screen time in just two episodes manage to make an impression? Ask Mendes-Jones, because that’s exactly what he does with his character, Dane, a member of the Brotherhood of Steel.

With screen presence like that, there’s no doubt in my mind Mendes-Jones’ star will continue to soar, so he instantly became a top priority guest for Collider Forces.

The Person Who Inspired Mendes-Jones to Pursue Acting
Image via Prime Video

While discussing Mendes-Jones’ first steps toward becoming a professional actor, he admitted that that wasn’t the goal initially. His greatest passion was football, and he was quite good at that too. He recalled:

“I played football until I was 17. I was a soccer player and I wanted to go professional. I was offered a first team place at the club I was playing for, which was, ironically, Tottenham Hotspur, and I’m a massive Arsenal fan.
I was offered a first team place there, but I turned it down
when I was 17 because my parents wanted me to go to university and get a degree instead.”

While leaving football behind wasn’t the easiest move for Mendes-Jones to make at the time, he does credit that shift with giving him a “now or never” attitude about acting. “If I’m not doing football, let’s give acting a go.” And that’s exactly what he did. He continued:

“I didn’t do any acting until I was 17. I auditioned for the school play when I was 17. I got a role in it and had loads of fun doing it. That was already pretty motivational. But we did a week-long run and on one of the nights when I was going between the backstage and the bar, a parent — and I don’t know whose parent it was, I’ve never met the guy before — stopped me and said to me, ‘Are you planning on doing this?’ And I said, ‘No, I wasn’t,’ and he said, “You should. You should.” And I was rubbish in that play [laughs], but it was that thing of, ‘Oh, he’s seen something,’ so that kind of gave me the confidence to entertain the idea. So from there on, I just kind of followed my nose. But
I would have never pursued it if he hadn’t said that
.”

Booking His First Big Movie, ‘Havoc’ Starring Tom Hardy
Image via Gareth Evans

That parent’s instincts were on point. The first job Mendes-Jones booked was a big one — Gareth Evans’ (The Raid) Havoc, starring Tony Hardy, Forest Whitaker, Timothy Olyphant, Luis Guzmán and more.

Booking a role out of an audition is obviously a huge win in and of itself, but there’s another reason why Mendes-Jones quickly dubbed his Havoc audition his “audition high” during a round of the Collider Forces game, Dicey Questions:

“The first job I booked was a film called
Havoc
for Netflix that hasn’t come out yet with Gareth Evans. That would be my audition high, I think, because
I’d come out as trans a couple months before and it was my first audition for an actual trans role
, like a non-binary, masc role. Having that come across my desk already was like, ‘Cool, I’m not just like, I’m non-binary in my life and then playing different roles on camera.’ It was like actually getting to audition as myself. It was a
long
process. I had in-person stunt tests and stuff, but booking that was definitely a big high. That whole process of getting called back for it and stuff. It was a really cool project with, I mean, Gareth is a legend of action films, so to have all of that happening and it also be a role that felt like me was such a privilege. Big, big, big high for an audition.”

The Havoc highs continued on set because that particular working environment proved ideal for a newcomer making their first big feature opposite industry icons. He explained:

“I’d kind of come straight out of training. Six months later, I was doing my first day on set, and my first day on set was a scene with Quelin [Sepulvida] and Justin [Cornwell], who are the two leads, with Tom Hardy and Luis Guzmán.
I was stood next to Luis, and I feel the weight of all of his films next to me.
[Laughs] That was my first-ever day on a professional set was that experience, and that was
terrifying
. I was like, ‘I’m just some guy. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be in this room, let alone next to them on camera. It’s wrong.’ But on that job, that whole team, both behind the camera and in front of it, were so supportive and really generous, not just in their work when we were shooting, but off set, as well, to really kind of take me under their wing. A lot of them took me under their wing and kind of went, ‘We’re all in this together and we’re gonna give you the leg-up that I wish I’d had on my first set.’”

Unfortunately, Netflix has yet to give Havoc a release date, even though principal photography concluded in late 2021. Hopefully that will change in the near future, but Mendes-Jones has two other epic titles for us to enjoy in the meantime — Fallout and The Wheel of Time.

The Toughest Part of ‘Wheel of Time’? Seeing Everyone Hate Renna

The Wheel of Time came first and presented Mendes-Jones with an especially challenging role, a selfish and extremely sadistic Seanchan sul’dam who makes Egwene’s Season 2 journey an especially tough one to watch unfold.

Given the role appears to present Mendes-Jones with a multitude of performance challenges, I asked him for the single thing he thought would be the toughest to tackle, and if that truly wound up being the hardest or if something else caught him by surprise. He laughed and said, “I thought the toughest part would be, ironically, convincingly making her hateful. Then, what ended up being the toughest part was seeing everyone hate her.” He continued:

“
When you play someone that horrible, for me, I had to humanize her.
I had to justify, like
really
justify everything she does to myself. Otherwise, I don’t think I could play her as someone who knew that she was doing bad. I spent a lot of time working through the script really carefully, working through it with Rafe [Judkins] and with Justine [Juel Gillmer] and Maddie [Madden], and finding exactly the motives behind a lot of beats and why she does certain things and the way she behaves. Picking that apart was so fun, and finding out what makes her tick and what put her in this position, and I ended up just feeling so attuned to her, which sounds horrible given who she is. [Laughs] Then, when everyone was coming in and being like, ‘I
hate
her. I
hate
Renna,’ I was like, ‘But she was doing her best. She was nice. I don’t see the problem, really. I don’t really get why everyone hates her, but okay.’ So it was kind of the exact opposite problem of what I thought I was gonna have.”

In order to justify everything Renna does in The Wheel of Time Season 2, Mendes-Jones leaned into one particular key trait: “She is incredibly egotistical.” He added:

“Egwene is a rung on a ladder towards Renna being the star. So, she sees Egwene’s strength and her power as a jewel in a crown for herself. I kind of gave her this kind of egotism because the niceness comes from disagreeing with the methods of the empire, but not with the ultimate goal and the structures and systems. So, she believes in the system of the Sul’dam-damane dynamic, but she believes she can do it better than they do it. So she wants to use Egwene’s resistance and power of fire to make her an even stronger damane than the ones who are broken. The shape that Maddie and I discussed at length for Episode 6, for ‘Eyes Without Pity,’ which is just beautifully written by Rammy Park, an unbelievably good script, what we did is the start is supposed to be, ‘Are we going to see the breaking of Egwene?’ But the end is that Egwene breaks Renna. When Renna picks her up to hang her, Renna’s desire to change the system is broken. She is now full-on slave owner, Sul’dam, ‘I will beat the living daylights out of you to get my results.’ So we had that nice little thing of, you think it’s Egwene who’s broken, but it absolutely isn’t.”

Making ‘Fallout’s Dane Wide-Eyed, But Not Naive
Image via Prime Video

Mendes-Jones put a heavy emphasis on backstory work and justifying his character’s choices in Fallout as well. He began:

“With Dane, I think my work really was to kind of focus on their belief and why the Brotherhood. Why not some other faction? I knew that Dane had come to the Brotherhood at some point — Geneva [Robertson-Dworet] and Graham [Wagner] had told me that much — so I knew that they weren’t born into the Brotherhood. I think, for me, the work I did was to kind of, wide-eyed, ‘Look at all of this. I get all these brothers and siblings and sisters to hang around with. I’m not the only kid. There’s all this cool tech. I get taught stuff.’ I feel like Dane’s the kind of kid that really values school, like a bit of a swot, and enjoyed getting to go to lessons and be taught about toaster ovens, and really was taking diligent notes and doing their homework and learning it all. And I think that wide-eyedness, for me, the thing I was very cautious of was making it not this naivety. They’re wide-eyed. They’re taking it all in. And
I think you see that in the hospital scene with Maximus, where they’re a happy-go-lucky kind of guy. They’re pretty open, heart-on-the-sleeve, but you see there that there are more cogs turning
, and they’ve been watching a lot more than you think and taking a lot more in than you think.”

Those cogs continue to turn as the season progresses, but we have to wait to see it for ourselves until Dane returns to screen in Episode 8. What’s Dane been going through those six episodes? Perhaps something in particular that inspires them to tell Maximus, “There’s nowhere safe, Max. And there’s no leaving. I wish there was”? Here’s Mendes-Jones’ take on that:

“From Dane’s perspective, being on the base for those two weeks that Max misses out, Maximus dies for Dane. He’s announced as dead a couple of days in. So, the way I see it is, the Brotherhood punished Max for putting the razors in my boot. That’s Dane’s perspective is like
‘Shit, I lied and now they’ve killed him for it.’ It’s the vindication of not going yourself, and the horrendous guilt of that being the consequence.
Then I find out that, actually, he’s alive, so seeing him approach was a shock. As far as I’m concerned, Thaddeus is out with Knight Titus. So
I think Dane’s moved up the ranks due to observational skills
, and that’s obviously been recognized by Quintus and by the elders. But, I think there’s a jadedness and a new, not respect, but respect in a fearful way of the setup in the Brotherhood that I think previously they weren’t fully clued into yet.”

“I Gave Myself Permission to Just Be Myself”
Image via Prime Video

There’s no ending a Collider Forces conversation without asking the guest to pinpoint something they accomplished that they’re especially proud of, and Mendes-Jones had an especially beautiful answer.

“
In
Fallout
,

I kind of gave myself the little kick in the butt to be myself in the character.
I played the games before getting cast and I had this show on my radar before the audition came across my desk just to watch as a fan. And Jonah [Nolan] was a bucket list director I wanted to work with, and Ella [Purnell] was a bucket list actor I wanted to work with, so it was kind of like the dream role when it came along, let alone the fact that it’s a transmasc character, non-binary character — someone who
is
me. I don’t have to play someone else. And
I think I gave myself permission, when we started shooting, to just be myself. I don’t have to pretend to be more man than I am, or less man than I am, or anything other than who I was.
There were times on set when that was really hard. When you’ve got your own personal stuff going on, your own personal feelings, it’s difficult to not let that inform choices you make in terms of where you set the voice or the expressions or the way you stand or the physicality, or anything like that. Even down to the costume choices and makeup choices. I remember every single one of those decisions, feeling the desire to do something that would be for my benefit and going, ‘No. I’m gonna serve the character. I’m gonna just relax and be myself in this role.’ I’m really proud of myself for that, I think, because there were times when that was really difficult.”

Looking for even more from Mendes-Jones on his journey from football star to Hollywood star? Be sure to watch our full Collider Forces conversation in the video at the top of this article, or you can listen to the interview in podcast form below:

Fallout In a future, post-apocalyptic Los Angeles brought about by nuclear decimation, citizens must live in underground bunkers to protect themselves from radiation, mutants and bandits.Release Date April 11, 2024 Streaming Service(s) Prime Video

The Wheel of Time Season 2 is available to stream on Prime Video.

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Fallout Season 1 is also available to stream on Prime Video.

Watch Here