This article was originally published at Shondaland.com
In “Twisted Metal,” the “Encanto” star embraces her super anti-hero.
The following interview was conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike authorization.
Before landing the role of Quiet in the funny, action-packed Peacock series Twisted Metal, actor Stephanie Beatriz had yet to play the infamously popular car combat video game the new series is based on. “Tons of friends from my adolescence who I’m still friends with (which will tell you about my sense of humor) were so pumped when I was cast in this,” Beatriz recalls to Shondaland. “They were like, ‘Send me pictures! Send me scripts!’ I was like, ‘No, but you can watch it when it comes out!’”
The star of Brooklyn Nine-Nine and Encanto prepped for her audition by diving headfirst into a gamer rabbit hole and turbo-reading the scripts. “I think I read them all in one day,” says Beatriz while exuding warm, friendly vibes. “I couldn’t stop reading because I never read anything like it — it was crazy, amazing, unhinged, ridiculous. I understood where Quiet was coming from, who she was as a character. I’d just never seen anything like that on TV. It’s its own little monster. I thought, ‘I love this monster. I want to be family with this monster.’”
It wasn’t long after auditioning with actor Anthony Mackie, who co-stars with Beatriz as delivery driver John Doe, that the family bit came easily: “I really enjoyed working with him, being a witness and watching his work,” Beatriz says of Mackie. “I think it shows — I hope it shows! I think our chemistry together as antagonistic partners is joyful to watch, and there’s also something adolescent about it. I don’t know how else to describe it; it’s kind of like the first time you’re around somebody that kind of gets your goat but you also think is kind of cute. Emotionally, these people are stunted as hell. He’s such a talented actor, and he’s not afraid to look dumb, which I think is always a bonus for me. I think in comedy, the dumber you allow yourself to look, the more juice you can get out of it.”
Beatriz describes the trajectory of her career as a series of full-circle moments. She studied theater in college and did plenty of musical theater, dreaming of the bright lights of Broadway. “After I graduated, I moved to New York but quickly found out that New York was a tricky place to be if you wanted to be on Broadway,” she explains. “There are certain schools where the pipeline is easier to get into that world.” Undaunted, she cut her teeth in regional theater. “I learned so much by doing regional theater. That’s sort of the core of how I approached work — I have a really intense work ethic because I started my career as part of an ensemble; you’re always part of an ensemble, and that’s still how I think about it.”
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Broadway remains high on Beatriz’s to-do list. She hopes to conquer it like one of her earliest inspirations, actor/writer John Leguizamo, did. “His one-man show was on TV late at night when I wasn’t supposed to be awake watching TV, and it really changed my life,” she relates. “There was this moment when he talks about how his uncle used to sneak him into the theater to see plays, and he saw A Chorus Line. There was a Latina in the show, and he couldn’t believe there was a Latina in the show. So, I’m a little kid watching him say this on TV, and it was like multiple universes happening at once — like a picture in a picture. I was watching this man saying this about a performance he had seen, and I was feeling the same way about his performance in that moment.” The meta-ness of it all wasn’t lost on her. “I just thought this is what I want to do — I want to do this, what he’s doing now.”
Working with Leguizamo when she starred as Mirabel in the 2021 Disney film Encanto was the realization of one of her biggest dreams and was a full-circle moment she’ll never forget. “I’m such a big Disney fan! To be invited to be a part of that was just absolutely phenomenal,” she says, her enthusiasm and gratitude palpable. “I grew up on sort of that golden age of Disney, and I’m a fan of the older work as well. The animators there are so gifted; what they do is amazing, incredible storytelling. The effect that I could see that the story has had on people when they talk about having watched it for the first time during the holiday season with their families is like, ah!”
Beatriz is especially proud of the story: “Not for nothing, I’m also one of the new Disney heroines where the story isn’t about getting a happy ending in the way we’ve all been told. It’s a different type of happy ending; it’s a new type of happy ending. There’s so much about the story of Encanto that is about empathy for others around you and really trying to see people for who they are and not who you think they’re supposed to be. All of that is just such a great, beautiful story to tell kids. You’re not hitting them over the head with anything. You’re just saying, ‘Look at this story. Doesn’t this story feel good? Don’t these values align with how you want to be in the world?’”
One of the surreal benefits of being a bona fide Disney heroine is the swag that takes over your kid’s room. “It’s such a weird, strange thing that she has multiple Mirabel dolls!” Beatriz laughs. “She’s got one of those sticker decals on her wall. I’m not one of those fancy moms, I’m like a real mom, so my kid’s nursery just looks like a kid’s room. Is that weird or just super-cool? Maybe it’s both.”
Another full-circle moment that came to mind was the time she worked with the L.A.-based “super-smart” comedic playwright collective called Culture Clash. “I used to spend a lot of time in the library when I was a kid — ’cause it was free — and I picked up a play written by Culture Clash,” she says. “Half the jokes I didn’t understand, but I knew it was something special.” Eventually, Beatriz originated a couple of roles in their play called American Night: “Again, I thought, ‘What is happening in my life that this has come all the way around?’”
Her third formative, full-circle moment as a young, aspiring actor was the first time she saw Daphne Rubin-Vega originate the role of Mimi Marquez in the stage adaptation of Rent. “I played that CD so many times,” Beatriz says. “I had a bootleg VHS that someone took from the audience of Daphne Rubin-Vega. I was obsessed with it! I was obsessed with her. I was probably a little bit in love with her at the time. To have that come full circle and be in In the Heights with her was a total dream.”
For Beatriz, the biggest challenges in filming Twisted Metal were off the set: She’d moved to New Orleans for the shoot with a 9-month-old baby while her father was losing his battle with cancer. “We wrapped the show, and he passed two days later,” she says openly. “Every night when I would get home and every morning before I would leave, it was dealing with the nitty-gritty of all the stuff: Okay, we’re starting hospice. Okay, we’re doing this part. As the eldest daughter — my parents and myself are immigrants to this country, and my sister too (she was born in Argentina) — I was really the person that was managing the paperwork of dying. There’s so much paperwork of death. It’s the paperwork up to, and then all of the paperwork afterward as well. My sister was handling everything while I was away at work, so we were just trading off.”
She found her time on the set to be a healing reprieve in the face of her grief. “It’s such a testament to the power of art because going to work allowed me to be in a space where I got to play,” Beatriz confides. “Play is so joyous; it’s something that we really only let kids do. As adults, we don’t really enter that space very often. We have hobbies, and maybe we get to play a little bit here and there, but to be able to play over those two months, to be able to do physical comedy, riff stupid jokes with M.J. [showrunner and series developer Michael Jonathan Smith] and Anthony, and be so playful, it was really a balm on my existence during that time. There weren’t a lot of spaces where I was able to be joyful at that time, but work was certainly one of them. This show was really funny, and it was funny as hell on set too! We were dying, laughing all the time.” After all, it’s only a matter of time before we’re sure to be laughing too while watching Beatriz in Twisted Metal.