A Working Man

A Conversation with Eve Mauro

A hero is only as good as their villain. Our desire to see criminals taken down in absurd and cathartic ways often relies solely on how despicable said criminals are. Unhinged? Even better. In an almost three-decade career, Jason Statham hasn’t necessarily wanted for great villains but it wasn’t until his recent collaborations with David Ayer that we’ve finally had some 80s-style heavies for him to square off against.

If Statham is the successor to Arnold or Sly (something you can read David Ayer and I discuss in my recent interview for The Playlist), then his villains oughta be larger-than-life caricatures, eating every inch of the screen. We had tastes of that in last year’s delightful Beekeeper with Taylor James’s Kraven the Hunter-esque final boss and Megan Le’s psychotic evil Beekeeper, but both only popped into the movie for fleeting moments.

In Statham and Ayer’s latest collaboration, wonderful throwback A Working Man, our hero has an entire rogues gallery of human traffickers to contend with. From Chidi Ajufo’s Dutch, a giant of a motorcycle gang leader to a cascade of Russian mob-types goofing it up all around him, Statham’s Levon Cade has no shortage of memorable faces to kick in. One face that completely took me off guard was Eve Mauro’s Artemis.

Covered in tattoos (including forehead ink espousing a classic from John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven”), cackling like a maniac and looking like a million bucks, it took of all thirty seconds of screen time for me to ask myself “who the hell is this??” As soon as the press screening ended, I went straight to Google to figure out why I hadn’t seen this woman in a hundred movies by now. It turned out I had, in fact, seen her in the great little Dolph Lundgren DTV-joint Riot but with a screen presence like hers, I couldn’t believe A Working Man was the first time she was able to explode on screen in a giant theater.

A Working Man is another solid Ayer/Statham effort that would totally work on its own but when Mauro’s Artemis is onscreen, the movie jumps to eleven. Whether it’s her pure sadism or bizarre, not-so-subtle relationship with brother Viper (Emmett J. Scanlan), there’s just something about her performance that sticks to the ribs long after the credits roll. Artemis could’ve been a silly, if forgettable heavy that spits a few lines of venom, is killed and never thought of again. In Eve Mauro, you have that rare villain that has you wondering what they’re up to when they’re not in the film.

Wanting to know more, I went to the source and had a lively conversation with Eve. From working with Ayer and Statham to crafting Artemis physically and emotionally to be more than a stock bad guy, to the fulfillment she gets from charity work and how she became a producer on an upcoming doc on the criminally underrated Boo-Yaa T.R.I.B.E., we hit it all. If you’ve read me long enough, you know that action is what’s nearest and dearest to my heart. The joy of that is often discovering faces you were unfamiliar with. Henchmen or one-off fighters who pop right off the screen. Eve is right up there as one of the best and I’m certain A Working Man isn’t the last we’ll see of her.

You can watch our conversation in its entirety below.

-Brandon Streussnig