Adeline steps into one of gaming’s most iconic roles and makes it entirely her own.
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There is a moment early in the new Mortal Kombat film that sets the entire emotional architecture of the story in motion. Eight-year-old Kitana watches her father die. It is brutal, wordless, and utterly unforgettable and it is the wound that everything else flows from. For Adeline Rudolph, the actress who carries that wound into adulthood across the film’s two-plus hours, understanding that scene was less about technical preparation and more about letting a character’s pain become a physical language.
Talent Adeline Rudolph @adelinerudo
Photography Dylan Perlot @dylanperlot
StylingAmanda Lim @itsamandalim at The Only Agency @theonly.agency
Makeup Allan Avendaño @allanface at A-Frame Agency @aframe_agency
Hair Zachary Morad @zacharymorad at Exclusive Artists @exclusiveartists
SocialTesia Kuh @thefirstthree.co
Special thanx Emily Rennert, Zoe Tucker and Lauren Decker at imPRint @imprintpr
Publisher Aleksandar Tomovic @alekandsteph
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“Fighting was another language,” Rudolph says, leaning into an idea she admits she hadn’t quite articulated before. “It was seen as a way to express what Kitana was going through and how she felt about her opponent.” The insight came during more than a month of intensive training in Wushu, Kung Fu, and Tai Chi, a rigorous immersion that would have tested any actor, let alone one navigating her first major stunt-driven role. “In the way that she would fight, in the way that she would maybe show mercy or be ruthless, that is definitely indicative of how she feels about the person she’s fighting with.”
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It’s the kind of nuance that director Simon McQuoid clearly had in mind when he described Kitana as possessing “a core of steel but also a real vulnerability.” Rudolph, for her part, resists the idea that those two things needed to be reconciled at all. “It wasn’t necessarily about balancing the two,” she says. “I think it was going head-on with both elements of her. That’s just who she is as a person. Her strength comes from her vulnerability.” She pauses, then adds: “It is her vulnerability that makes her so powerful in many, many ways, in the way that she cares about her people, in the way that she cares about Jade, her sister. It was less about trying to balance the two, and more about letting both elements live in her simultaneously.”
Simultaneously is the operative word for everything Rudolph brought to this role. Kitana is, after all, one of the most iconic figures in the Mortal Kombat universe, a character whose razor fan blades and regal composure have made her a fan obsession for three decades. The viral audio clip, “Kitana wins. Flawless victory,” has taken on a life of its own across the internet, a cultural artifact with genuine weight. Rudolph was acutely aware of the responsibility. “For me, the way to honor a character like this is to really dive into the source material,” she says. “Lucky for me, I had so much source material, just by watching gameplay online, but also being able to play the actual video game, and then really diving into the lore. There’s so much you can find out just by researching Kitana herself, but also the relationships she has to the different realms as well as all the different characters.” The homework, she explains, was ultimately in service of synthesis. “Trying to pull all of that and then merge it into the script version, that’s what I tried to do, to stay really true to her.”
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And the video game itself? “I just button smash,” she admits with a laugh, “so I wouldn’t necessarily say that I’m good at it. But I have won. So take from that what you will.”
It is that quality, self-deprecating warmth wrapped around quiet confidence, that makes Rudolph’s Kitana feel genuinely fresh. And it extends off-screen, too. Her co-star Tati Gabrielle, with whom Rudolph previously shared a very different kind of supernatural screen space as the Weird Sisters in Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, now faces off against her in the brutal world of Mortal Kombat. Asked who would win in a real-life confrontation, Rudolph doesn’t hesitate for even a fraction of a second. “Tati. In a heartbeat. Are you kidding? That girl has a black belt. Tati would win 110%.”
But perhaps the most resonant dimension of Rudolph’s performance, and of the film itself, is what it means culturally. As someone with Korean heritage who grew up navigating the space between cultures, stepping into a predominantly Asian cast carried a weight that went far beyond craft. “It was the first time that I had been part of a cast that had so many Asian faces,” she says, “and it felt really natural and really exciting to me.” She speaks about it with a kind of quiet reverence, as though she is still allowing herself to fully believe it. “Growing up, I never thought that in Hollywood we could have a movie like this. And so to be a part of it is really special. I loved every second of it.”
Mortal Kombat is in theaters now.
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