From there, Nora Dominick asked Carla Gugino how she got involved with the project despite her young age — at which point Gugino revealed that she was never even on any of the original casting lists for Ingrid. According to the actress, it all came down to a meeting she had with Robert Rodriguez after the film’s production had already began; Gugino refers to a «longer story» before giving Dominick the apparently abbreviated version.
«I was sitting with [director and writer] Robert Rodriguez; they’d already been shooting for two weeks,» Gugino recalled. «He was like, ‘I feel like I’m looking for a mother for my kids.’ We were talking about it, and I had auditioned for him and he said, ‘I think if we do our job right, no one will ever question it.’ And it’s so funny like you said, nobody did,» she said directly to Dominick.
Not only that, but Gugino revealed that she and her onscreen husband Antonio Banderas knew each other, which helped create believable chemistry once she was cast: «Antonio Banderas and I had worked together on a movie called ‘Miami Rhapsody’ that David Frankel directed, so we also had a little bit of a history, which was really nice to come into it that way.»