Looking up photos of Genesis Rodriguez, it’s not exactly hard to see why she’s in movies. The hair, the body, the perfectly tanned skin. For Christ’s sake, she was featured on an episode of Entourage merely getting out of a car while rap music boomed in the background and the camera feasted on her perfect figure. You know you’re hot when.

There is, however, much more to Rodriguez than her Instagram account.

On the phone from Los Angeles, the Miami native is promoting her latest, Run All Night, a crime caper—opening Friday (March 13)—starring Liam Neeson as an ex-hitman forced into protecting his son, Mike (Joel Kinnaman), an honest limo driver, from the clutches of his old boss (Ed Harris). Rodriguez plays Gabriela, Mike’s wife and mother to his daughters (with a son on the way).

At this point in her career, Rodriguez has had a steady stream of notable roles in films like Man on a Ledge, Kevin Smith’s Tusk, and this year’s Oscar winner for animated feature, Big Hero 6, but she still had to test for the relatively small, albeit vital, part she takes in Run All Night.

“I flew to New York to audition,” she says with a subtle accent that belies her family’s Cuban-Venezuelan heritage. “I really fought for this role. I’m not at that stage yet where I just get offers left and right. I wish I was, because it is hard out here; it’s real hard. I like that, though. I like earning my roles, and when I get on-set, people expect me to do a job and I know I can deliver because I earned it.”

Indeed, Rodriguez has been steadily dispelling the notion that she’s just a pretty face, culminating in her appearance as Honey Lemon in Big Hero 6.

“It was definitely tough,” says the actor, who insisted on doing all the voice-over work for her character in Spanish as well as English. “Because you go in and you have no wardrobe, you have no set—you have nothing. No other actors to work off of. You have your director that kind of just puts the whole picture in your head, and you just have to figure it out as you go.” Rodriguez ended up with a Women Film Critics Circle Award nomination for the role.

It’s safe to say that she thrives on hard work and the tougher aspects of her job, so it’s not surprising that one of Rodriguez’s favourite memories while filming was also incredibly stressful.

“We had some pretty long nights,” she recalls. “I remember I worked all night and I had to change my flight because we were working, and I had to run from the set to the flight, and it was kind of awesome. Because I felt like I was in the real movie, Run All Night.”