The Woman King 's Lashana Lynch on how physical training gives her mental strength
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As Izogie, one of the West African warriors under Viola Davis' General Nanisca in The Woman King, Lashana Lynch is a force: One scene in which she easily bests a male soldier in a pain-threshold competition is just the baseline of her strength. Izogie is just the latest bold character Lynch has portrayed in her career; previous roles include Nomi, the brash MI6 agent going toe to toe with Daniel Craig's James Bond in No Time to Die and fighter pilot Maria Rambeau in the MCU. Lynch recently spoke with EW to talk about training for The Woman King, what attracts her to powerful roles, and how her physicality has informed her career choices.
Ari + Louise
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: Tell me about your training process for The Woman King. How long did it take for you to get ready?
LASHANA LYNCH: It took me the entire shoot to get ready. I was shooting Matilda last summer and we tried to push training as far to the end as possible so that I wasn't switching gears too far in advance. So the last two weeks of Matilda, I was shooting in the day, like 6 a.m. to 6 p.m., and then training in the night, 7 p.m. to 10 p.m., which was really intense.
That alone gave me a really deep foundation for what it's going to take to represent the Agojie in the most authentic way. What it was going to take to withstand 3 a.m. night shoots, doing fight routines on my own, doing my own stunts, because she was also a badass. So I trained at the end of Matilda, and then we trained every single day that we were working [on The Woman King]. An hour and a half of weight training in the gym and about three hours plus doing martial arts and core work.
What is your fitness level during normal times when you're not training or filming?
I enjoy working out. I come from a sports background, so I'm also used to being active whenever possible. I thought that having gone to the gym and being able to rely on being genuinely fit would be enough, but honestly, whatever experience you have physically, you would never have been able to be prepared for the level of intensity that you would experience training for The Woman King. Honestly, I have a strong core and I have good muscle memory when it comes to working out, but even that wasn't a strong enough foundation for the hard work that The Woman King would entail.
What did you do workout-wise before?
In my first ever film, Fast Girls, I played a sprinter, so we were doing a similar thing where we would train for weeks and then on weekends, and then we'd shoot and train at the same time. And that was a springboard into me learning more about health and fitness and diet. So generally HIIT exercises, core work, a lot of abs. High intensity for short bursts, which again, a good foundation for this training, but still no way near enough for what we had to do for The Woman King.
Ilze Kitshoff/TriStar Pictures
With the hour and a half of weight training and then also the three plus hours of martial arts per day, I can imagine that you probably needed a specific diet plan to be able to sustain all of it.
We were put on a meal plan pretty early on. As soon as we all got our roles, we were on five meals a day, a real athlete's diet. So brown rice, sweet potato, fish. Really plain fish. And as someone who is a big foodie, I love taste. And removing taste and deep enjoyment from my food was a struggle. In the morning we start with some eggs, gluten-free toast if we're having a workout that morning. Then we'd have a protein shake. And then a lunch would be protein, veg and then we'd have maybe a tiny pot of home-cooked carrots. And then in between all of these, half a protein bar and then dinner would be much of the same, plain protein with brown rice or sweet potatoes.
[Trainer and nutritionist] Gabby Mclain also focused on a water cleanse. So I would be drinking five liters of water every day. It helped with water retention and helps your muscles and your veins show in a different way.
They couldn't give you a little salt or oil or something?
I mean, there were some herbs, really low salt, really low carbs, really low fat. And then as the shoot went by, we realized that on certain days we'd need different things. So I'd need maybe more carbs at the start, and then we'd realize next week we have night shoots. So then we'd have to tailor the food around that. And eventually, as I said to Gabby, I need something. I need hot sauce.
You seem to gravitate to roles where you play a woman succeeding in a male-dominated space, with The Woman King, No Time to Die, and Captain Marvel. What is it about these types of characters that appeal to you?
Nicola Dove/MGM Lashana Lynch as Nomi and Daniel Craig as James Bond in 'No Time to Die.'
I really enjoy being in charge of my body. As a young woman, being a poor, curvy girl, I wasn't in spaces that celebrated my shape and my physical power. So I wanted to harness that as much as possible as I grew up. My choice of career was a really great chance to exercise my wants. Part of that was me being physically strong or really competitive and determined to push my body beyond its limit. And I just enjoy feeling powerful because in feeling powerful in your body, you get to really feel powerful in your mind. And the two combined is what makes me feel really most like myself.
So it was not as though I've chosen these super-cool roles because I just want to kick a man in the face every day. I really wanted to be a great example of not just being a superhero, but actually being physically strong and showing that it can be realistic. If any young girl out there wants to be an astronaut or a secret-service agent or fighter pilot, then it is absolutely possible because I've seen women that do it.
I love that point. You're talking a lot about the physical preparation and how it also leads into the mental preparation for offscreen. What do you take from that moving forward in your own career?
That I have a responsibility to myself to push boundaries and ensure that my physical, internal and mental well-being is always on a hundred. All of the health facts that I know — the nutrition, how the diet affects your mind and how you think, and how to really use it to your advantage. These are all things that are really important to me to have a good life.
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