Some actors, when confronting a physically grueling role, might spend six months getting ripped at the gym or finessing their mixed martial arts moves.

Gabrielle Union? She did Pilates and drank rosé.

“I didn’t want to do any sort of special training because the character really wasn’t planning on this,” she said of playing Shaun Russell, a mother desperately battling ruthless invaders who have locked her two children inside her deceased father’s maximum-security home in “Breaking In.” “She didn’t have a history as a Navy SEAL or Special Op or jujitsu champion. So when you see Shaun throw a punch, I want it to look primal — like a feral cat just scratching, clawing, using anything at her disposal to save her children.”

“Breaking In,” opening Friday, May 11, is her third collaboration with the producer Will Packer (“Girls Trip” and the “Ride Along” movies), who is her partner on BET’s soon-to-wrap two-hour finale of “Being Mary Jane” and the 2016 family comedy “Almost Christmas.”

It also earned her the Breakthrough Producer of the Year award last month at CinemaCon, the theater-owners’ convention. “We took a movie with a very, very low budget, only a couple main household names, and we got a summer release date,” said Ms. Union, who recently signed a first-look deal with Sony Pictures Television. “We got a big marketing budget, and we have a studio that really believes in us, so I think that alone helped me get the award.”