If you only see one movie this year with Oscar-winning English Patient star Juliette Binoche driving a big rig, make it Paradise Highway.
Frank Grillo had a laugh with ABC Audio about that would-be tag line for the new thriller, but he says playing her shady brother was nothing short of a dream.
Grillo plays Dennis, the about-to-be-freed convict brother of Binoche’s Sally, a truck driver who he pressures into smuggling for him to keep him safe behind bars.
However, things take a turn when one of Sally’s “packages” turns out to be a trafficked little girl (Hala Finley).
Another Oscar winner, Morgan Freeman, plays an investigator on their trail.
“It was a dream for me because she’s just someone I admire so deeply as an actor,” Grillo says of Binoche. “She’s ‘all in’ all the time.”
He adds of the thriller, “It was heavy stuff, but we had such a good time.”
The actor, a veteran of Oscar winner Zero Dark Thirty, as well as the blockbuster Purge films, and Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Civil War for Marvel Studios, is earning a reputation as the hardest working actor in movies.
In 2021, he starred in a slew of projects, including Copshop, the action film he co-produced with Gerard Butler; the medical fraud drama Body Brokers; and the Hulu action film Boss Level. He also reprised his character Brock Rumlow/Crossbones in Marvel Studios’ animated What If…?
Other than Paradise Highway, which is now in theaters and On Demand, Grillo has been hard at work on no fewer than six other movies, including the lead as Ferruccio Lamborghini in the biopic about the genius car inventor.
Long story short, he’s so busy he can’t keep track of them all.
“You know, my agents yesterday said to me, ‘Hey, dude, after the fall, you need to go away for a while,'” Grillo says, laughing.
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