‘Ambulance’ star compares working with Michael Bay to his soap opera days

In an exclusive interview with Movieweb, actor A. Martinez opened up about what it was like to work with superstar director Michael Bay on his next film, Ambulance. Martinez, the Daytime Emmy-winning veteran of such soap operas as Days of Our Lives and General Hospital, described the film as an “epic, colossal thing.”

Ambulance stars Yahya Abdul-Mateen as Will Sharp, a man who recruits his adoptive brother Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) to help him rob a bank to help pay off his wife’s medical bills. The pair hijack the titular vehicle, and take an EMT and a critically wounded officer hostage. Martinez plays Papi, a criminal friend of their late father.

When asked what it was like to work with Bay, whose films are kinetic and chaotic onscreen, and meticulously-planned off, Martinez compared the experience to that of working with one of his former directors on the soap Santa Barbara:

“I had a director [on the series] back in the day, a man named Michael Gliona, who was similar to [Bay] in that he would compose scenes based on a certain kinetic sense. He wanted things to have a flow to them, like a dance-like quality […] and [Bay] is pretty much just like that. A lot of the times, he’d just say, ‘Okay, the camera is going to come and find you, and as it finds you, I’d like something in counterpoint to happen,’ and that was really easy to do. I trace it back to my own [Santa Barbara] roots.”

Ambulance opens nationwide April 8.