Carla Gugino Filmed ‘Spy Kids’ at 27 Years Old and Says Her Casting as a Mom Was ‘Physically Totally Impossible’: ‘I Was 10 Years Too Young for the Role’

Carla Gugino recently told BuzzFeed that her beloved role in Robert Rodriguez’s 2001 family action film “Spy Kids” was “physically totally impossible.” The actor was 27 years old when she filmed the movie and played Ingrid Cortes, the mother of two spies. By Gugino’s math, the character didn’t add up.

“It is so funny because I was 27,” Gugino recounted. “It was a really beautiful kind of double-edged sword because I love that movie so much. And the whole experience was incredible, and the movies continue.”

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“I love Ingrid Cortes. But it was funny because I was 10 years, at least, too young for the role because I was a spy for 10 years and then somehow had children who were like 9 and 11,” she continued with a laugh. “So it was physically totally impossible.”

Gugino starred in “Spy Kids” opposite Antonio Banderas, Alexa PenaVega and Daryl Sabara. She said the movie had already been filming for two weeks when she took a meeting with Rodriguez to be cast in the movie.

“He was like, ‘I feel like I’m looking for a mother for my kids.’ We were talking about it, and I had auditioned for him and he said, ‘I think if we do our job right, no one will ever question it,’” Gugino said about her age. “And it’s so funny like you said, nobody did. Antonio Banderas and I had worked together on a movie called ‘Miami Rhapsody’ that David Frankel directed, so we also had a little bit of a history, which was really nice to come into it that way.”

“Spy Kids” was a box office hit in 2001, grossing nearly $150 million worldwide on a reported production budget of $35 million. The movie launched a franchise for Rodriguez, with Gugino and the entire main cast returning for the 2002 sequel “Spy Kids 2: The Island of Lost Dreams” and the 2003 follow-up “Spy Kids 3D: Game Over.” Rodriguez rebooted the franchise with a new cast for both 2011’s “Spy Kids: All the Time in the World” and last year’s “Spy Kids: Armageddon,” which streamed exclusively on Netflix.

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