Hit Man isn't just responsible for one of The A.V. Club's favorite movie scenes this year. (The notes app "fight," of course.) It also kicked off a whole new phase in its star Adria Arjona's career. "Rick [Linklater] asked me to write with him, and allowed me to have a seat at the table, and really listen to my ideas, and really picked my brain," she recently told IndieWire of crafting her character, Madison—a foil and romantic interest for Glen Powell's fake hit-man, Gary—in collaboration with the director. "That's never happened to me," she previously said of Linklater's unique process in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.
While Arjona didn't get a writing credit on that particular film, she said that Linklater "really made me believe that, ‘Oh, wait, I do have this producer brain, and maybe I can write,'" she continued.
The breakout star—who also appeared in Zoë Kravitz's directorial debut Blink Twice this year—took those lessons to her latest film, Los Frikis, which she also produced. In the film, which was based on a true story, Arjona stars as Maria, nurse to members of a Cuban punk rock band in 1991 who purposefully inject themselves with HIV to gain entry to a government-run treatment home. "There was a liberation," not only to having a hand in the production side, but also to playing a character that allowed "a lot of the materialism [to get] kind of knocked out," Arjona shared. “I’m Puerto Rican. I was by the beach. I had no limitations, because these directors [Tyler Nilson and Michael Schwartz] gave me no limitations. They’re like, ‘She’s you. Now, go for it.’ So I felt really free, and I always looked for that feeling." (She "definitely owe(s)... a lot" to all the directors she worked with this year, she said.)
Now that she's found her voice, Arjona wants to contribute to the conversation around how Latin American women are portrayed onscreen, though she would never say "'I’m going to represent Latin American women, and I’m the definition of Latin American women.' I’m not, nor do they probably want me to be."
"I want to showcase different versions of what a Latin American woman can be," she explained. "So those three stereotypes that we’re so used to seeing a Latin American woman as, are disheveled by all these quirky, weird characters that I’m playing. That’s my role in it."
