THE ARRIVAL OF AMERICA’S SHOULD BE SWEETHEART. FALL 2014
Gina! Gina! Go Gina!
The Arrival of America’s should-be sweetheart
All over Los Angeles posters for The CWs Jane The Virgin adorn the streets of Hollywood, even making reach to some of the less looked at corners of the city of angels. Eating chicken on a stick, directly in front of me is its very lovely star, Gina Rodriguez. Remarkably enough, this “Jane” has only seen a single one of her glorious posters where she stands pretty and pink and dumbfounded.
“The other night I wrapped at 3am in Long beach, and as I’m driving home I saw it for a split second while on the freeway,” she says. “I was on the phone with my boyfriend and I go oh shit! I saw it! I saw it! I don’t go anywhere besides set and home so I haven’t had a chance to see much of them yet.” Sounds about right when you’re the literal face of a new series. Jane The Virgin is loosely based on the Venezuelan telenovela about a young woman who despite being a virgin, is mistakenly artificially inseminated during a routine checkup. However, make no further similarities between the two works as this American counterpart is sure to be much different all the while bringing a new color to the young network.
Just four years after Silvia Horta’s Ugly Betty, TV is ready for another kind of Latino family---The Villanueva’s. Right off the bat Gina Rodriguez is different than your average small screen-leading lady. Sure she’s confident and seems very comfortable in her own skin, but she’s also assertive, and overly excited and giddy of her new status as America’s very own Juana La Virgen. Her enthusiasm and smile are inspiring and contagious and this show is her baby. This Chicago native is not only thrilled for the responsibility a role like this may give her; she welcomes it, wanting it and owning it. She tells me that upon initially reading the script it “breathed life into her reality,” a reality that didn’t include sombreros and piñatas in one hand, and tacos in the other. Instead she thought, “Here’s this girl chasing her dreams. She has a mom, and a grandmother. Her grandmother speaks Spanish to her and she responds to her in English. That’s my reality.” It’s more than safe to say that it was that newfound reality that attracted millions of viewers on premier night. Making it the most watched program in its time slot since 2009, America really liked Jane.
“The story wasn’t slapping me across the face with my brownness. They weren’t slapping me in the face with the fact that I am not two pounds, and still beautiful and living a beautiful life like everyone else, damnit!” she explains, her enthusiasm only growing stronger, mine along with hers.
"I think what the entertainment industry has gotten wrong is that they think that the Latino story or black story is different. Or constrained to one," she explains. "On our show, we have some Latino writers as well as white writers. Some men, some women, and they’re just writing from the perspective of a girl, not a brown girl. So for people to classify Jane The Virgin as a Latino show I think would be limiting. How am I able to relate to Full House? Or The Cosby Show? I’m able to relate to them because they’re human. It’s a human story."
Prominent Hispanic characters are becoming more and more popular on television. This TV season, in addition to The Virgin MTV dished out HappyLand, a theme park set comedy revolving around Lucy Velez (Bianca A. Santos) and her less than responsible mother who reveals to her that her biological father is the owner of the park they’ve been working at for most of their lives. Meanwhile, the brand new Cristela a situation comedy on ABC stars comedian Cristela Alonzo as the title character, a recent law school graduate on her quest to living the American dream.
So yes, strides have been made, but Jane The Virgin will prove to advance the perceptions of Latinos even further. “When you’re young you have dreams and you fight for them. And then it doesn’t look the way you thought it was going to look, and the journey isn’t the way that you thought the journey was going to be,” her words are soft, but her concentration doesn’t derail. “Then you get there and you think, how the hell did I ever deserve this? And how can I make it possible for other people. And how can I do something with this that will mean something, and empower and change a generation’s social norm.”
The 30-year-old star feels such a connection to the woman she first met on paper that already, not having completed the first season, she’s already taking advice from her. No stranger to the camera and craft, Rodriguez has done her share of movies as guest appearances, including a hefty one on The Bold and the Beautiful. But it wasn’t until encountering this project that she’d ever experience this---“ I’ve learned that one has no control over the writing. I get invested and feel such a connection to her, but yet I can’t really control her destiny. But then again, you and I cannot control our own destiny. It’s about letting go. I’ve realized that I’m a huge control freak. So I’m letting go of what I thought Jane’s life would look like, the same way I have to let go of mine.”
Not to mention the fun, playful tone that comes along with the show, apparent from the very first sequence during the pilot. It’s the colorful and warm; yet intimate culture that Latinos identify with. The melodramatic, grounded into reality, with a spice of telenovela charm and a pint of fun. . The other day at our table read I read something, and I tell you I stood up and said “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” she confesses, while standing showing me her exact movements at the time of her reaction. “People are going to go on a rollercoaster with me. She is going to break the mold and bust down the walls of the boxes that we tend to put ourselves in. She’s going to change the way we view beauty. There’s a character for everyone, not everybody has to relate to Jane. However, I love Jane because she’s not what everybody believes should be beautiful, a leading lady, the hero. But she is all those things and I feel so blessed that I get to play her.”
If you haven’t stopped reading this mid-sentence and rushed over to your TV set or laptop in fear that this too will lose its heart and authenticity, you may be wrong. “The four leads are Latino, although some of us have different
backgrounds. What’s beautiful is that they (writers, producers) let us speak up when things don’t feel right or if they’re a little off. But to be honest so far they’ve been pretty much on the mark.” I think so, too.