STEPHANIE BEATRIZ OF 'BROOKLYN NINE-NINE': FROM POTATO VILLAIN TO POP CULTURE BICON

Words by Alexandra Henrikson

If you are a fan of Brooklyn Nine-Nine you know Stephanie Beatriz as the arresting, smart and hilariously dead pan Detective Rosa Diaz. But if you were a classmate of hers in middle school you might know Stephanie Beatriz as “the twisty little mustached top-hat villain” of her first ever school play. It was pun-nily titled: Heaven Help The Po’taters OR I’d-a-hoe the Potatoes, But They Just Won’t Grow! “It was a melodrama,” Beatriz clarifies, adding that she was “a human villain” and not a potato villain. But if you spend any time with Stephanie Beatriz the actor you will learn that she peppers her speech with the phrase “You know?” This may seem unimportant but it sums up something essential about Beatriz: she knows a lot. And because she is a generous team player, she gives the person she is conversing with (in this case me) the benefit of the doubt that I would know too. But the more time I spent with Beatriz the more I realized that I, in fact, did not know. And that I was about to learn a lot about trailblazing an authentic path forward in Hollywood.

Beatriz was born in Argentina and immigrated to Texas when she was 2 years old. She realized she wanted to be an actor when she “figured out that storytelling was something that I could do. I remember in the rehearsal process,” of the aforementioned potato melodrama, “feeling like, oh, okay this is different. This is really fun. I’m making my friends laugh. I’m having a good time.” I asked her how her parents felt about her pursuing acting? “They were pretty concerned,” she repeats herself, amused, “They were pretty concerned. Obviously I can't speak for every immigrant in the United States, but my parents are immigrants. And so am I. And so I think what they wanted was for me to feel the freedom to craft my future in any way that I saw it. And so even though they weren't totally supportive at first, I think that they wanted me to feel free to choose. And follow my heart.” She continued to pursue acting throughout high school. “Theater gave me a lot of confidence because it made me feel like, well, I don't want to be myself. I mean at the time I just didn't like myself. And so that was a way to disappear into somebody else and fall in love with that person.” I asked her to tell me more about that. After some thought she replied “I think there's confidence, truly, that came from knowing that, like, let's say a whole cast is relying on you…you’ve got to show up for them. So that gives you a sort of push to be confident. … But also, I think in some ways it is just an escape. You know? It's like you don't have to work on yourself necessarily if you’re just sliding into other people all the time.”

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Beatriz then connects that idea of escape in her youth to where she is living as an adult now: “That is definitely something that I discovered more here in L.A. than anywhere else.” She has some thoughts for the escapist creative type living in Hollywood: “You have issues and stuff that you're not working on because you're so focused on your work. You were trying to ambitiously move your career forward but maybe you should take a look at, you know, how you function as an adult in the world. Is it healthy - the relationships and friendships that you're creating? Or are you setting yourself up for failure unknowingly because you're so focused on career that you can't even take a look at your own life. You know?” Again, I did not know. But I do now and have some soul searching to do. Beatriz sums it up with a mix of clarity and self-deprecation: “I definitely think any form of art - expression of art - whatever it is - that anybody does creatively is going to lead them to some kind of self discovery. And self discovery I think leads to confidence. I think. I'm not totally sure. Check again in 20 years.”

Hearing Beatriz’s voice it is easy to forget this is the same actress who plays Detective Rosa Diaz. As Diaz, Beatriz’s voice takes on a husky quality. Like if the taste of scotch were a sound. Beatriz’s natural voice is pitched higher and moves quickly, clear like a bell. With the proliferation in Hollywood of personality actors, aka actors who are very good at being themselves on screen, I asked Beatriz how she crafted a beloved pop-culture character that is both herself and not. “You can't build a character out of thin air. You know? You have to start somewhere. You start some from some essence. Some idea of something. And ideas that you have about humanity, about what human beings are, or how they function in the world, most of them are based on your own experiences. So you're growing something from a seed that is already inside you. … Kind of like, you know, like a succulent cutting. You're basically taking a chunk of yourself and then cultivating it in a different environment with different words with different likes/dislikes. And you are adding it all back in and then saying ‘who is this person?’ from there. But essentially they're always based in you. Right? But you're also only a jumping off point.”

Beatriz graduated from all girls Stephens College and moved to New York where she worked in theater. She lived on 41st and Dyer, joking “it is not terribly poetic” being spelled “D-Y-E-R. but still, it was pretty dire at the time.” She moved across country after a few years, joining the world renowned Oregon Shakespeare Festival. And after a few seasons there, she finally moved to Hollywood. Within her first year she booked Brooklyn 99. Beatriz recounts shooting the pilot as “a very exciting time because we just didn't know what was gonna happen. You know? When you shoot a pilot you just don't know if - if that's gonna be it. And I remember we were shooting one night, kind of late, and Joe Lo Truglio and Andy Samberg and Melissa Fumero and I were all sitting around … and we were all just chatting and I remember thinking ‘Oh. Okay. Just take this in because this might be the last time that you get to hang out with these cool people like this you know? You’re together and you're having fun and anything is possible right now, but also, this might be it. So enjoy it.’ And, you know, cut to seven seasons later. It’s been a fucking ridiculous, wild ride.” This is one of those Beatriz “you know?” moments for me. Many run away from working in the arts because there is no security, no guarantee that a year from now you will be employed. The ephemeral nature of acting is something she embraces: “You can choose to manage it, or you can let it affect your every waking moment, you know? There's no universe in which you're always in control of your life, no matter who you are. … Acting is just one version of that.” Although Brooklyn Nine-Nine has been a critical success and a fan favorite, it was canceled by FOX after Season 6. When she got the news Beatriz remembers thinking to herself “okay, well you had a great ride.” She told herself, “any television job or film or any of it ends. They all end eventually. There's no world in which they go on forever,” she pauses, “unless, like, you're the Simpsons.” (The Simpsons is in its 31st season.) Beatriz continues, “I just try to not take any of it for granted and remember how lucky I am to be a part of the thing that I'm doing. Whatever that job is.”

Brooklyn Nine-Nine was picked up by NBC and Beatriz is shooting Season 8 this summer. I asked if she always wanted to be a comedian. Beatriz corrects me, “I don't think I would call myself a comedian because I think comedians are people, like, I think of somebody really brilliant like Chelsea Peretti as a comedian. I wouldn't call myself a comedian because I don't write my own material. I'm an actor that's really trying to be good at this particular genre. [And] the genre that I’ve been given now, with Brooklyn Nine-Nine, is situation comedy. So I'm trying to be as good as I can within that medium.”

You get the feeling that Beatriz, who paid the bills before acting as a fitness instructor, is always inner coaching herself to be better, to craft deeper and to push past her fears. When she got the audition for the film of the Broadway musical In The Heights directed by John Chu, coming out this summer, she confesses she was “scared out of [her] fucking mind” and almost didn’t audition. I asked what her fear was rooted in? She responded with self-deprecating clarity “I wouldn’t describe myself as a singer. I wouldn't have,” she corrects her own thinking, “you know, obviously, I'm good enough to have sung in a Hollywood musical so I must be doing something okay. But … I felt like it was gonna be out of my element. At the same time I felt really compelled to do it.” I asked what ultimately changed her mind. The answer was her friends, specifically Melissa Fumero. Fumero told her, “You better fucking audition.” Beatriz recounts, “After I heard my friends say, like, you're crazy if you don’t go in for this - what are you so scared of? You know? … It made me kind of question myself. Like if I try this, and get as prepared as I can be for it, and then fail - what’s the worst that can happen? You fail but you fuckin’ worked really hard and tried really hard.” And she got cast.

Beatriz is taking up more space in Hollywood and being hailed as a Bicon, which if you haven’t heard the term before is exactly what it sounds like: a bi-sexual icon. When her character Detective Diaz came out on Brooklyn Nine-Nine I asked her what the experience was like for her? She was very positive: “I really felt like I had a voice. I felt like I was very involved in the telling of that story. I talked to the writer's room … they gave me an open forum to talk about what I wanted to or didn't want to talk about. And Dan Gore and I discussed where we thought we were going to go. … I read the initial first draft of the script and I gave my notes on it. And one of the big notes to me was like, please keep the word bisexual in there because I think a lot of times, up to this point in our television’s history, it's been very rare that people use the word - it's just like suddenly this person’s a lesbian or suddenly they're straight. And that's not always the case for people, you know? So that was very exciting to be a part of that - developing that story line and how [it] would go. And it was a surprise and exciting to see that they were going to put it in the 99th episode … which fell really, really, really right and not heavy handed. And just perfect.”

As a trail blazing actress that has worked from stage to TV to film, I asked what kind of work she hopes to make in the future. She sights Bong-Joon Ho: “One of the things that he's trying to do is tell stories that feel reflective of what the world really is now, as we're living in it right now.” She passed along a quote of his that sums up the type of art she wants to make in the future: “There are people who are fighting hard to change society. I like those people, and I’m always rooting for them, but making the audience feel something naked and raw is one of the greatest powers of cinema. I’m not making a documentary or propaganda here. It’s not about telling you how to change the world or how you should act because something is bad, but rather showing you the terrible, explosive weight of reality. That’s what I believe is the beauty of cinema.” Beatriz connects that to making In The Heights, work that is “joyful and buoyant in moments and fun, but that also has a lot of real real human shit … Those are the kinds of stories I want to tell.”

From speaking with Beatriz it’s clear she values the ‘real real’ above all else in her life. Especially as she builds her life and career and community in Hollywood. “People will make friends with you and then suddenly it feels like it was kind of a career move for them to be your friend. But it's really valuable [in LA] to make friends with people and just exist in the knowledge that all they want from you is your friendship. That’s it. Just your support, your friendship and your love. … I know it sounds totally obvious right? But it’s not always obvious, you know? And that's the greatest lesson I've learned for myself in the last, I'd say, 10 years: friendship is everything. And choosing the people that are the true ones, the ride or dies - the real ride or dies - not just the ones that, you know, say they are. The ones that like actually show up for you and want it to be about your friendship and nothing else - those are the people that I invite into my life. Everybody else can get the fuck out.”

From potato villain to pop culture Bicon to claiming her singing voice onscreen, Beatriz is blazing a way forward as her real real self. I can only imagine how many people will follow in the path she is making as their real real selves too. Stephanie Beatriz. You know?