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Gina Carano could be considered the female fighter who first paved the way for the likes of Ronda Rousey and Liz Carmouche to invade the UFC.

Carano, with her movie-star looks, helped give women’s MMA a face to build around. She has since went into acting, starring in such movies as “Haywire,” and the upcoming film, “The Fast and Furious 6.”

However, UFC president Dana White stated over the weekend that he would welcome Carano back with open arms if she decided to return to MMA – and Darin Harvey, the manager for Rousey, seconds that.

“Gina has a very lucrative movie career and it doesn’t really make a lot of sense for Gina,” said Harvey on The MMA Hour. “But Gina is a fighter in her heart and I think Gina may want to prove that she can beat someone like Ronda who is considered the best.”

Carano hasn’t fought since a 2009 loss to Cris Cyborg. She has hinted at a possible return to the fighting world, but that could prove difficult if she keeps accepting and landing these movie roles.

However, as big of a money-making fight as Rousey-Cyborg would be, you would have to think Rousey-Carano could top it.

Women’s MMA is briefly detailed. It starts with Gina Carano being the first female mixed martial artist to gain popularity, and it ends with Dana crowning Ronda Rousey.

It appears Gina Carano is just about finished for good with a career in MMA.

Carano, who was the star in the recently-released Haywire movie alongside such notables as Ewan McGregor and director Steven Soderbergh, is currently in talks to join the upcoming flick, Fast & Furious 6, according to a report by The Hollywood Reporter.

Carano, who helped the rapid-rise of women’s MMA, would play an agent alongside Dwyane “The Rock” Johnson. The film will also star Paul Walker and Vin Diesel, regulars in the series.

While not totally saying her fighting career is over with, it appears that’s the case. The more movie roles Carano goes after and lands, the less and less likely it is we will see her compete inside the cage again.

Carano, who is 30 years old, holds a 7-1 record in MMA, including three knockout victories. She last fought in 2009, falling to Cristiane ‘Cyborg’ Santos via TKO. She was cast for In The Blood earlier this year.

Photo credit: GQ

So I’m going to take a wild guess that Gina Carano doesn’t return to MMA and Strikeforce anytime soon.

Reason being she just landed another leading role in an action film. The Hollywood Reporter broke the story late tonight.

After making her breakthrough with the action vehicle Haywire, the MMA fighter-turned-actress is coming on board to star in In the Blood, an action thriller being directed by John Stockwell (Into the Blue, Blue Crush).

Described as being in the vein of Taken, Blood is set in motion when a husband disappears while vacationing in the Caribbean with his wife, to be played by Carano. The grieving wife passionately and recklessly pursues the men whom she believes kidnapped and killed him. Bennett Yellin and James Robert Johnston wrote the script.

“This role will showcase not only Gina’s fighting skills, but also her acting abilities as her character struggles to reign in her violent past,” Stockwell tells The Hollywood Reporter.

The movie is scheduled to start shooting in late spring/early summer so it’s pretty much a given that she wouldn’t fight again until well after the movie wraps, if she ever fights again period. She didn’t close the door on returning to MMA in her recent round of interviews, but it certainly sounded like acting is the priority in her life now. I’d love to see her fight again, but hey if acting is where her heart is now and she can make a career out of it, then good for her. Either way, we still get to see her kick butt.

Image via Esther Lin for Strikeforce/Showtime

Ronda Rousey made an appearance on G4TV’s Attack of the Show to promote her upcoming fight against Miesha Tate on March 3. Rousey also explained that her recent Twitter beef with Cris Cyborg was mostly about defending her “girl” Gina Carano.

HT: Cage Today

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The mystery has been solved.

In an interview with Fightlinker’s Matthew Polly, Gina Carano confirmed that her voice was in fact altered in Haywire. Her explanation:

GINA: Yeah absolutely and I’m surprised that hasn’t come up sooner. Stephen Soderberg wanted Mallory Kane [the character she plays in the movie] to be a completely different entity than Gina Carano. So he definitely went in and I went in to AVR and he did some tweaking. We all knew that that was going to come up because people know me so well in the MMA world. But he is quite a genius in what he has created and it still was an honor to be a part of it. Even though it might not sound exactly like me, there are still parts of me that are in there. But he just wanted to make sure that that entity was completely different from myself.

ME: Gotcha. And I just wanted to be clear, because TMZ was hinting that you had been dubbed over by another actress and I just wanted to clear up that that wasn’t what happened.

GINA: Yeah, everyone was a little curious about that. And I don’t blame anyone for being curious about it. But if I was bald and they had given me the voice of Bill Clinton I still would have done the movie.

Funny enough, Gina’s publicist immediately jumped in and stopped the interview after she answered the question. Maybe it was just coincidence, but it sure seemed like they don’t want her saying too much about it. I personally think changing her voice is kind of lame, but I haven’t seen the movie yet so maybe it was the right call.

Switching topics, Gina also commented on Cris Cyborg’s positive steroid test. Understandably, the news makes Gina wonder if Cyborg had an unfair advantage when they fought.

I definitely could have lived without hearing the news that she had tested positive. You know, it kind of hurts. For me that was one of my biggest moments. That was my biggest moment in mixed martial arts… It was huge. And of course people were saying that around me and I didn’t want to take anything away from her so I would steer clear of that question. But now that it’s positive years later, it really kind of hurts. But at the same time it could be some misguided direction. Someone around her was telling her that was a good idea. Obviously it isn’t something an athlete like her needs to do. She’s already a phenomenal athlete without it. I’m not going to sit here and rejoice in the hard time she’s going to have to fight back into the hearts of the fans to, you know, not be considered a cheater. I know she’s a great person and she’s going to get past this hard time and use it to make a better person out of herself. I know that because I’ve been around her, the little I have. It’s unfortunate that someone around her was telling her she needed it. That hurts my heart for her. But at the same time, there is this other part of me that’s like, “Dammit, I don’t want to hear that, because that was the biggest moment in my life.” I’d be lying if I didn’t say that it felt like a stab in the heart.

Gina basically went off the grid after that loss, however she said she would have “absolutely” continued fighting and working for a rematch if the movie hadn’t come along. But since it did, she has some major decisions ahead of her. Given the opportunity she says she would do “another film over and over and over” in a “heartbeat,” but she doesn’t want to completely abandon her MMA career. She’s not giving any concrete answers on her future, but it sounds like acting is probably going to take priority in her professional life if those opportunities are there, and similar to Cung Le, we could see her take sporadic one-off fights in between roles.

Image via Esther Lin for Strikeforce/Showtime

I attended an advance screening of “Haywire” tonight, which stars Gina Carano. This is relevant to our collective interests because, hey, it’s Gina Carano. You remember her, don’t you? She was labeled “The Face of Female Mixed Martial Arts”, and together with Cris “Cyborg” Santos, was the more hormonally-balanced half of the biggest female MMA bout in history. So how was Haywire? Let’s just say that when director Steven Soderbergh is on, he can make a fantastic film. Also, Carano can’t act.

The story concept isn’t a new one – a “secret agent” gets betrayed in the field, goes on the run, and tracks down those who ganked her – but there are flourishes of the modern world in there. Carano’s character, “Mallory Kane”, isn’t so much a secret agent as she’s a private contractor (and ex-Marine), and the “betrayal” hinges not on shifting international ideologies but on money and government contracts. Aside from one fisticuff on a beach, the fight scenes are exciting and believable, a mix of Jason Bourne and Anderson Silva that doesn’t stretch reality too much. Carano’s co-stars, which include Channing Tatum, Ewan McGregor, Antonio Banderas, Michael Douglas, Michael Fassbender and Bill Paxton, all turn in palatable performances. And Soderbergh infuses the flick with the same stylized storytelling (read: use of score and scene dissection) that made his other films, such as “The Limey”, “Traffic” and “Ocean’s Eleven”, so entertaining. But whenever Carano speaks… damn. Just damn.

Which isn’t to say she’s like Sophia Coppola in “The Godfather Part 3” – she doesn’t sink Haywire, she’s simply the reason it takes on a bit of water towards the end. Yes, we get that she’s supposed to be a badass, capable of taking a hard beating before eventually slipping on an armbar or triangle choke (and following that up with a close-range gunshot wound to the face). Yes, she’s a fast thinker, and calm, cool and collected under fire. All that was believable. What was not, however, was her simmering anger and the appurtenant one-liners. The Carano we know grins sheepishly after winning via TKO in the cage; she does not stare into the camera and convey cold hate. Sorry, not happening.

While Haywire falls short of “Warrior” in terms of where it rests on the MMA-related movie ratings scale (note: Warrior was a solid film), it’s by no means the next “Never Back Down” (note: note a good film) or “The Expendables 2: Electric Bugaloo”. It’s just that, with Soderbergh behind it, and the stellar list of co-stars it sports, I expected more. I was hoping for a female Jason Bourne-esque character, kicking ass and conveying emotion in such a way that the audience doesn’t laugh at the attempt at drama. Instead, I got Carano glaring out at the dusky landscape, muttering “You better run” to a nemesis she can’t see and eliciting a cackle from the dude sitting beside me.

Check out Haywire for yourself. Just don’t expect Carano to blow you away.

Quite a few Haywire clips and news items hit the net today.

Above, you can catch a glimpse of the first five minutes of the movie which includes a pretty badass fight scene between Gina Carano and Channing Tatum and another clip below.

The biggest news of the day however is Gina’s voice in the film. TMZ initially broke the story this morning, suggesting that her voice had been altered via a little Hollywood magic in post-production. And you know what? I think they’re right. Some actors are able to mask their accents really well and change their voice to a degree — Christian Bale is a prime example of this — but that’s not the case here. Her voice sounds radically different than in real life, almost to the point to where it’s distracting. I included an appearance Gina made on G4TV for a point of reference.

Despite the voice issue, it does seem like Gina can act. Maybe an acting coach or someone with a better eye for that sort of thing would disagree, but as an average moviegoer, she doesn’t come across to me like she’s acting, which I can’t really say about other fighters-turned-actors we’ve seen in big movies. I was concerned that would be the case when she hardly spoke any lines in the trailer, however if the preview clips are any indication, she might actually have a promising future in Hollywood if she chooses the right projects.

If nothing else, the critics seem to like it and didn’t make any poor comments about Gina’s acting ability. Rotten Tomatoes screenshot via Cage Today:

All in all, I’m really looking forward to this movie now. I’m hoping the voice alteration won’t ruin the film for those of us who are familiar with Gina’s voice, however all other signs are pointing to Haywire being a pretty good flick. It releases in theaters next Friday, Jan. 20.

Bonus: Gina Carano chokes out AC Slater!

HT: Cage Today, The Fight Nerd, The MMA News