obviously, I was having all these separations, like my body was separated from what I was thinking, and I just felt like I was just basically manifesting Rita’s inner thoughts. And if only all these people in this audience can really know how I truly feel about you, you know? I was really into the words of what the song was saying,
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Congratulations on ‘Emilia Perez’ and the incredible response to the movie. You received a nine-minute standing ovation at the Cannes premiere, how did that feelwhen you are standing there? I don’t know what I was thinking, but I know that I was feeling really overwhelmed for all the right reasons. Obviously, we hope that when we put so much of our time and effort into a project, we only hope that it’s well received or at least it’s not hated, you know? And so this over-exceeded my expectations. The reception was amazing. We knew we were swimming upstream, I mean, imagine every cast member getting the script or getting a synopsis so, ‘Okay it’s a Jaques Audiard movie. It’s his next movie. He wants to see you. It’s about an nark…..’ It’s an opera, by the way. It’s a musical. ‘It’s about a nark who needs to transition into a woman, and you’re going to play the lawyer that helps him do that.’ And you’re like, ‘I’m sorry. What? What?’ ‘Oh. And it’s in Spanish.’ I’m like, ‘Oh, of course, of course.’ ‘And we’re going to shoot this in Mexico.’ ‘Absolutely.’ You’re like, ‘What else? What else?’ You know, it was crazy.
How did what you saw on screen compare to the experience of making the movie? with it being the first time you had seen it. The whole cast. I don’t know if Jacques did that on purpose, because he really wanted to just get like a natural, real response from us simultaneously with everybody - or it was impossible. I mean, we’re all living in different countries and we’re all coming at different times, you know, arriving in Cannes. But it was special. It was definitely very special.
You are such a talented physical performer, but this film asked you to stretch even further with is being a full-blown musical! What was it like to perform all of those numbers? Well, I want to touch on what you said - it’s a musical. Jacques was adamant about our transitions into those musical pieces or those songs or those choreographies to be seamless. He did not want to do a musical. He wanted an opera. And he got it because after a while, yes, I learned everything, but once we put it all together, it just felt like I was Rita. And trying to say something. So in my mind,
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Tell us more about your character and what she gets to portray her inner life through the story? I feel like when you meet her, she’s desperate. She’s desperately lonely. She’s desperately hungry to grow. She’s underappreciated, overlooked, underpaid, and very much invisible in a country where it’s not her natural country. She wasn’t born there. And Latin America can be quite hard than all the occidental sort of parts of the world when it comes to immigration and when it comes to people darker because they’re all of colour, we’re all, Latinos are like that. But we there’s a little bit of colonization, the colonized mentality that we still have maybe 500 years more to kind of like break out of. And that’s a very complex conversation. So to be able to play someone like Rita in my native tongue, because Spanish is my first language, and as an Afro Latina and having the free agency that Jaques gave me to ‘Just put her together. Get her in Mexico. I want you for the part. You don’t think you’re Mexican? For me, I would believe it because it’s a melting pot of so many cultures anyway. But just write your backstory and sometimes you’ll be like, that’s too much, that’s too much. Just keep it for yourself. That’s okay. It’s not going to make it into the film….’ And I would tell him, ‘I’m going to write it anyway.’ [laughs] Like, ‘Her mother is this and her dad…’ Because I live always in the backstory of my characters and so do many of the actors. So it was just delicious to sort of like surrender to that desperation of when you know you have so much of you that you want to share, and yet you are being kept from yourself and from your environment over reasons that you cannot control, nor do you want to change. It’s just the way the world is. So living in that discomfort of Rita was interesting. It was awful as well, because that means that I have to surrender to the reality of, what so many people go through as being transplant and illegal aliens or immigrants and things like that. But also, she was very smart and there were these misconceptions that she had of what power is because her examples and her role models or her boss exploits her day after day.
What was it like getting the opportunity to play this role in your native tongue? I realised that I have to continuously practice my Spanish [laughs] because when you have to perform it, I’m kind of like, ‘Oh, cra-p.’ Like, Karla speaks Castilian and I couldn’t hold up to her beat, to her cadence because I’m very much very gringa in so many ways. Rita was Mexican. Because leaving as a child, she acclimated into this environment, so very much like Rita thought like a Mexican, she navigated her life as a child that was raised in this culture. She made her decisions according to that. But never lost sight of where she was. But I don’t think that her being Dominican or her being Mexican was the most important thing for her. It was that she was a lawyer, and she was just tired of being poor and being powerless.
And how was that to play someone from your culture? It was very liberating. I consume art in Spanish from the music to…all mediums of art I consume in my native tongue. And it’s quite beautiful our culture and our art in all mediums. It’s really rich and we have very talented people. So I wanted to branch out in my personal life, I’m very grateful for the journey that I’ve had, the
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