Adrianne Palicki's Ms. Perkins Role In John Wick Was Originally Written As Mr. Perkins
This post contains spoilers for "John Wick: Chapter 4."
It's very interesting going back to watch the original "John Wick" movie now that the titular character is dead. (Until they find a way to bring him back for that fifth film that's on the table). These movies have evolved in some crazy ways from the lower budget, more bare-bones start to the current epic, operatic big-budget insanity that we got in "John Wick: Chapter 4." Wick has always been a guy you don't mess with, but he's so much more stripped down and grounded in the first movie.
The gunplay is on point and, yeah, he can absolutely take out a room full of thugs without breaking a sweat, but he's also not going around with a bulletproof suit, so there's a much greater sense of personal danger for the character in that first movie.
And one of his most significant threats in the film is Ms. Perkins, a fellow assassin with much more flexible morals than most of her contemporaries. She is the only one willing to break the "no business" rule at The Continental, setting her up as different from the more mannered and "elegant" assassins we glimpse in that film.
Adrianne Palicki played this part with a sense of mischievous danger. This character has no rules and no scruples about the mess she leaves behind in her wake, but it wasn't written for Palicki. In fact, it was so not written for Palicki that originally Ms. Perkins was Mr. Perkins.
'They didn't want to weaken the character at all'
Adrianne Palicki revealed this tidbit in a 2014 interview with The Film Stage, saying that not only was Perkins originally written to be a male, but the very first script she read also had the character as Mr. Perkins even though that was the part she was considering. So, how much did they change the character when Palicki signed on? Turns out, very little. Palicki said:
"They just didn't want to weaken the character at all. They wanted to keep that masculine, emotionless character intact, which is great and I think it really worked. And we also came up with a little backstory between the two. They probably, you know, [slyly grins], were friendly at one point. It worked with the sexual tension in the fight scene."
It's not uncommon for actors to inform their character with their own headcanon backstory and the sense of history between the two characters definitely showed through in the finished film.
Male writers have often been criticized for their work on female characters. Still, the secret seems to be (gasp, shock, wide-eyed wonderment) to just write them as you would a male character, with all the faults and complexities and contradictions and badassness that any human being, regardless of gender, has within them. It worked for Ms. Perkins in "John Wick," and, in fact, has happened before in Hollywood. For instance, all the characters in "Alien" were deliberately written as unisex, allowing every crew member part to be, the script noted, "interchangeable for men or women."
The point is, it's not about making a character masculine or feminine, it's about making them complex, first and foremost. That's the foundation and the rest of the character can be built on that.