All of a sudden, Carla Gugino is everywhere.

“Everything I’ve done in the last two years is coming out within a month of each other,” she tells me in an interview suite in the Shangri-La hotel. “That is weird.”

There’s Wayward Pines, the mystery miniseries that’s just started airing on the Fox network. There’s The Brink, a political comedy coming next month on HBO.

And then there’s the reason she’s here: San Andreas, a great big disaster movie that reunites Gugino with Dwayne Johnson – with whom she made Disney’s forgettable Race To Witch Mountain in 2009 – as divorcing parents scrambling from Los Angeles to San Francisco to rescue their daughter after a massive earthquake pulverizes large chunks of the California coastline.

The actors have a great odd-couple energy together – he’s massive but playful, she’s petite and vivacious – that recalls Gugino’s relationship with Antonio Banderas in the Spy Kids movies.

“I think chemistry is such a wild thing, because it kind of works its own magic,” she says. As far as acting with Johnson, “we just have a really good dynamic that feels very easeful. I think we’re a good balance for each other. Our strong suits are well paired.”

The fractured family dynamic also gives Johnson and Gugino a few more notes to play than disaster movies usually allow, which is what impressed her about the project when director Brad Peyton first approached her.

“Our first meeting was over Skype,” she says, “and I asked, ‘Am I wrong to think this is also really moving?’ And he was like, ‘Oh yeah, that is a huge crux of the movie for me.’ And continuously he just stuck with that.

“You understand why performance falls aside a lot of times in big green-screen movies,” she says, “because there’s so much technically to be dealing with. It can get tedious, because you’re having to do so many things over and over. But he was always on point with us, and very inspiring.”

That said, this isn’t a movie entirely about feelings. There’s also an elaborate single-take set piece that follows Gugino’s character through a rooftop restaurant that’s literally disintegrating around her.

“It’s the longest shot in the movie,” she says. “You have a fireball, you have glass exploding, you have people falling, you have stunts all over. Every single department had to be at the top of their game. It took four hours to reset that sequence each time we did it, so we only got to do it three times.”

And even if she was playing those scenes against a green screen, her panic and terror had to be as real as possible.

“I think that’s where theatre has actually helped me,” she says. “I’ve done a lot of very intense plays on Broadway – and you know, eight shows a week, your body starts to go ‘Which one is real and which one is not?’ So I’ve gotten good at reminding my body when I’m going to sleep: ‘You’re not in a terrible earthquake. We can just let it go until tomorrow morning.”