STACK #224 June 2023

Anthony Ramos & Dominique Fishback

Dean Scott Vazquez & Anthony Ramos

Words Glenn Cochrane

As the Beasts come out to play, so do two friends from Brooklyn, whose dreams of making it big have collided in epic fashion.

DYK?

Transformers toy line company Hasbro derived its name from the company’s original founders: Herman, Henry and Hillel Hassenfeld - the Hassenfeld brothers.

D ominique Fishback has been kicking goals for the past decade, having appeared in celebrated films like Judas and the Black Messiah (2021) and The Hate U Give (2018), and television series The Deuce (2017-2019). It comes as no surprise that she’s landed a lead role in one of Hollywood’s biggest franchises, but co-starring alongside her longtime friend was certainly an unexpected perk. “Anthony [Ramos] and I knew each other before we did Transformers ,” Fishback tells STACK . “We used to meet up in cafes, and say, ‘OK, what are we going to do together? Like, it has to be epic, even if we have to write it ourselves,’” she recounts. “We never imagined that we’d be characters in Transformers. Every time I think about that, it blows my mind!” Fishback’s career began on the stage, where she trod the boards before stepping into the world of independent cinema. When reflecting on her experience making Transformers: Rise of the Beasts , she attests that a production of this magnitude was not so far removed from acting on stage. “I honestly feel that doing something like Transformers is closer to being on stage than doing an indie,” Fishback says. “Obviously it depends on the concept and the director’s eye. ”Obviously there’s no robots there [on set], and everything is imagination - you really have

admitting that she had to see it like any other role so as not to buckle

to use your imagination - and that’s the same with theatre. In school, the teacher gives you a monologue and you have to create the world by how you speak the lines. You have to see things that aren’t there, and the

under the pressure. “I tend to approach every character the same way: I have to find what

their internal motivation is, and the thing that they care about,

audience has to watch your eyes and believe that you are witnessing or talking to somebody.” Being in a massive blockbuster movie is enough to terrify the most seasoned of players, but Fishback took the project in her stride,

and then I latch on to that,” she explains. “If I think about external factors, I might trip myself up by overthinking instead of being present.” Her pragmatic approach will serve her well now that the movie is about to be released to the world, and she has a globetrotting whirlwind of press junkets and hysteria ahead of her. “I believe that I’m ready for it,” she says with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. “I think there are certain things that you can’t be prepared for, if you’ve never experienced them. And there’s very few people in the world who have experienced something of this magnitude.” Having a friend beside her helps. “Even when we were in Peru, Anthony and I were running through the jungle in 110-degree weather, and we looked over at each other and I realised that there is no other person in the world who can say that they know exactly what it feels like to do this thing, right now, except for him. So yeah, I think I’m ready. I don’t know, but I’m excited!”

Dominique Fishback

ORIGINS IN STEAM The concept of giant robots and super-bots can be traced back to the 1930s, when Ō gon Bat (aka Fantomas ) featured a giant evil robot controlled by humans. The trend would later be explored in more detail in the manga and anime titles of the 1950s, with the likes of Tetsujin-28 , Astro Boy , and Mazinger Z turning them into relatable protagonists. If we follow the thread back even further, we find the earliest incarnations of giant robots in literature within the works of Jules Verne; the French novelist wrote about a steam-powered mechanical elephant in his 1880 novel The Steam House . Edward S. Ellis’s book The Steam Man of the Prairies (1968) featured a steam-powered mechanical man, and H.G. Wells introduced the world to alien tripods in The War of the Worlds (1897).

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