‘Jane the Virgin’ star breaks down barriers
When actress Gina Rodriguez was a kid growing up in Chicago, she would turn on the TV and wonder: “Why does no one look like me?”
The youngest of three daughters of Puerto Rican natives, she asked her mom, “When did Puerto Ricans online Cheap come about? When were we born?”
She didn’t see herself in the movies and shows that she loved. She had “no concept of any kind of discrimination or any kind of limitation in the industry. I had no idea,” she said by phone from Los Angeles last month in the middle of a day of filming her CW breakout hit, “Jane the Virgin.”
“I just thought, ‘We must not have been around. My parents must have started the Puerto Rican race!’ ”
Rodriguez watched “The Cosby Show,” “A Different World” and “Family Matters,” because at least they featured characters of color.
Even though they didn’t have brown skin quite like hers, “that was the closest I came to seeing anyone like me represented on screen in a positive light,” she said. “When I watched ‘Full House,’ I never existed. I was never portrayed. And when I did see us, we always had a very inferior position in life.”
“That lack of visibility, that lack of relatability, really made me feel kind of alone in this world,” Rodriguez added. and have a massive platform from which to speak out about diversity and acceptance.
Here’s what Rodriguez did know: She wanted to act. She wanted to change the way Latinos were represented in pop culture. She wanted to do her part to make sure that little girls the next generation of Ginas would have role models on TV who looked like them.
She describes herself as a “pretty faithful person,” and religion has centered her. It has “made me realize that with great blessings come great responsibility. You cannot separate the two.”
After Rodriguez went from unknown to one to watch with her performance in “Filly Brown,” a hit at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, she had what, on paper, seemed like a dream opportunity: a role in Lifetime’s “Devious Maids.”
She turned it down.
Her family wasn’t so sure. They asked her, “Why are you trying to be a sacrificial lamb?” And sometimes even Rodriguez wasn’t so sure. She said she had how to buy antidepressants online http://www.cheapjerseys11.com/ Cheap “those moments of, ‘Oh, Gina, you better be freaking right about this! You know you did the right thing; did you do the right thing?'”
“Listen,” she said to her family then. “I’m not trying to be Jesus! I don’t think I’m the Second Coming. But I know this isn’t my journey. I believe it so hard. I just knew that that wasn’t my path, because it didn’t feel right.”
But “Jane” felt right, right away. Rodriguez said that five pages into the pilot script, she knew she had to be Jane.
In Jane, Rodriguez found a determined, funny, type A, compassionate woman who could be described by a bunch of buzzwords Latina, Catholic, virgin but was not wholly defined by those traits.
The nuances of the Latino American experience were accurately and lovingly portrayed. These three generations of women (Jane, her mother and her grandmother) talked and behaved in a way Rodriguez understood; Jane’s grandmother spoke Spanish and Jane responded in English, just like Rodriguez did with her own grandparents.
“It’s so fluidly graceful on this show, about Jane being American but having Latino roots, her not being afraid of who she is,” said Rodriguez. “The world Jane lives in is so accepting.”
The show is a twist on a telenovela, which might sound gimmicky on paper: “The pregnant virgin!”
But the axis of the “Jane” universe is the bond among the Villanueva women. Everything revolves around those authentic relationships.
Absurdity abounds: Jane’s father, whose identity she never knew, turns out to be gasp! the star of one of Jane’s favorite telenovelas. The father of Jane’s baby is not only the handsome, impossibly wealthy owner of the hotel where Jane works, but also it can’t be! the stepson of Sin Rostro, a vicious drug lord, who Dios mio! was having an affair with her own stepdaughter, who there’s no way! is the doctor who, distraught after catching her wife in bed with another woman, fails to give Jane a routine pap smear and oh, no! inseminates her instead.
And this is all before we get into the underground plastic surgery clinic, the homicides at the hotel, the faked death, the secret twins, the multiple proposals of marriage and the character who pretends to be paralyzed but rises from her wheelchair to shove Jane’s grandmother down a flight of stairs.
“Jane” creator and showrunner Jennie Snyder Urman had anticipated “a very long search” for her heroine, but Rodriguez was the third person to audition.
“She was just amazing,” Urman said by phone. “I remember rushing home and showing my husband the tape, asking, ‘Could we have found Jane so quickly?’ ”
Urman is still dazzled by Rodriguez’s willingness to say no to “Devious Maids” and hold out for a role like Jane. (The ABC produced “Maids” just started its fourth season airing on Lifetime.)
“It takes a tremendous amount of courage to turn that down when you’re in that mode, and you’re hustling and you’re trying to get that break,” she said. “To say no, you have to have an extraordinary sense of self and confidence and belief that it will eventually work out. It’s stunning.”
Rodriguez started making headlines for speaking out about Latino representation during the 2014 Television Critics Association summer press tour, when an answer to a fairly routine question about why she picked “Jane” over “Devious Maids” became, on the spot, something more like a mission statement.
“I found it limiting that that was the one that was available to me,” she told the reporter about the “Maids” role. “I found it limiting for the stories that Latinos have.”
The Latino Media Gap (a report recently commissioned by Columbia University, the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts and the National Association of Latino Independent Producers) found that the statistics bear out Rodriguez’s perception. In movies and on TV, Latinos “continue to be represented primarily as criminals, law enforcers, and cheap labor.”.
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