Stephanie Beatriz is most commonly known for her comedic chops playing Rosa Diaz in Brooklyn Nine Nine. Following this (and among other extensive credits), the 42-year-old showed off her spectacular singing voice playing Mirabel in Walt Disney’s Encanto.
Now, Beatriz is playing “Quiet”, a trigger-happy car thief searching for revenge in Stan’s Twisted Metal, which sees her character move through a post-apocalyptic world without any dialogue.
“You have extra time on your hands because you don’t have to memorise any lines,” Beatriz told Mediaweek and Chattr’s The Entertainment Hotline Podcast in a pre-recorded interview back in June.
While this may be an obvious sentiment, she continued: “So you [have time to] think, and that’s what I did. I thought about her backstory and everything leading up to this moment. When you first see her on screen, it informs you of who she is, and it was really fun. It was actually really freeing to just be able to act with your eyes and your face. You can tell a lot about what’s going on under the surface with just how you feel and how that comes out through your eyes.”
Stephanie Beatriz. Stan
Twisted Metal is from the minds of Rhett Reese (DeadPool) and Paul Wernick (Zombieland) and is a high-octane action comedy that follows a motor-mouthed outsider, John Doe (Marvel’s Anthony Mackie), who is offered a chance at a better life, but only if he can successfully deliver a mysterious package across a post-apocalyptic wasteland. With the help of a badass axe-wielding car thief (Beatriz), he is faced with savage marauders driving vehicles of destruction and other dangers of the open road, including a deranged clown who drives an all too familiar ice cream truck!
Stephanie Beatriz on how dance helped her learn fight choreography
Based on the popular video game of the same name, the series is all action, all the time — a genre that Beatriz was itching to tackle.
“I wanted to do action so badly,” she admitted. “I got a tiny taste of that on Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but I really scratched that itch on this show. It was so fun to learn from these incredible stunt choreographers, our stunt people, our stunt doubles. Like the fights look so real like they’re really happening.”
Beatriz’s co-star Mackie — who is no stranger to stunts given he played Falcon in several Marvel films — also had a very physical role, with Beatriz saying he did the majority of his own stunts.
Anthony Mackie and Stephanie Beatriz. Stan
“Anthony did almost all of his own stuff,” she said. “There’s obviously some things that are way too dangerous for either one of us to do but like I think it’s really fun when you can see our faces in the shots.”
Calling the fight scenes a “pleasure to do”, Beatriz also revealed that having a dancer background and portraying Carla in the film version of the Broadway musical In the Heights (2021), taught her how to learn choreography.
“That comes in really handy,” she said. “I think Jennifer Lopez has talked about that too in interviews where she’s like, ‘I have a dance background. You just apply the same kind of thing to learning fight choreography.'”
Stephanie Beatriz on Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick
Besides being able to show off her action skills, Beatriz said that executive producers Reese and Wernick were the ultimate drawcard to her involvement with the show.
“The first thing that really excited me was that Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick were executive producers on this and I’d seen a tone of their stuff,” she said. “Anyone that’s seen Deadpool or Zombieland understands that they have particularly strange and dark senses of humour. I just love that. That’s my favourite kind of humour.”
Twisted Metal. Stan
Adding to the powerhouse duo was scriptwriter and showrunner, Michael Jonathan Smith (MJ), another reason she wanted to get the part.
“MJ is our showrunner and he wrote the scripts with a small writing staff and they were just phenomenal,” she said. “They were true page-turners. I burned through those scripts all in one day. I was reading them out loud to my husband and my sister because I couldn’t get over how exciting the series was as the episodes kept unfolding and so I just knew I had auditioned for it.
“And then when I auditioned, Anthony and I just really got along like gangbusters, and I think you can see it in the series. The chemistry that we have is really palpable. It’s really fun and funny. And that’s my favourite kind of stuff.”
Twisted Metal premieres on Thursday, July 27, only on Stan.