Screened Icons | Rosie Perez

Your first acting role was in 1989, in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. What has guided your choices in terms of the projects you've been a part of, ever since? What do you think about when you think about the body of your work? What comes to mind and what do you find yourself reflecting upon? Probably how many times I had to say no. You know, because of the obvious...whether it's conscious or subconscious bigotry. It will be, 'No, I won't do that. No, I won't do that. No, I won't do that. Yes, I will do this...' And when I look back on the choices, it's was hard to hold out for the good stuff. That's why I'd always be so happy to be on set because I'd be thinking, 'Oh, fuck, I got it!' You know? It paid off to hold out.

With so much exposure across so many projects, are there things that stick with you in terms of what you know now about the craft and the community of actors you're a part of? It was literally on-the-job training for me. I am a sponge for knowledge, I love learning. In the beginning, I was hesitant to ask, 'How do you do this? I would be watching and learning. For Do the Right Thing, I would go on set when I wasn't scheduled to, because I wanted to see how the seasoned actors did their thing. Danny Aiello was the first actor to say, 'Come sit next to me.' He said, 'Here, honey. This is how this goes.' He gave me such great insight into the process and into the craft. I think about White Man Can't Jump and how Woody Harrelson was so respectful to me in regards to our love scenes. And by the time I got to Fearless, I felt more like, 'I'm gonna hit this out of the park'. Though I said that to myself, I did ask for help. I said to Jeff Bridges, 'What are you doing? Why do you do that?' I would say to our director, [Peter Weir], 'I don't understand your direction' or, 'I don't understand why you're asking me that', or 'I don't understand the text.' Fearless, was my first job where I felt, 'You are so capable of pulling this off.' My outlook kept evolving from there. I was talking to Mike Tyson deep last month, I was interviewing him, and we know each other for a very long time. It just dawned on me and I said, 'When you were a kid, did you know you were destined for greatness?' And he said, 'Yes.' I said, 'Me too.' He goes, 'I know you did.'

You knew there was more ahead for you... I remember telling this one counselor when I was young that I wanted contribute something important to the world. She looked at me and said, 'Well look at you.' I told her, 'I'm gonna do it." And she said, 'Yes, you are.' It was just who I was. What used to bother me as a child was the patronizing response I would get from some adults. If I had been a privileged child, they wouldn't have been patronizing. Sometimes the responses I would get would be, 'Oh my god, that's so amazing that you said that', or, 'I'm sure you will, honey, you just keep at it and you work really hard.' I thought, 'Shut the fuck up.' Even as a kid in my head I'd be rolling my eyes. Thank goodness there were certain adults who clicked into me, who knew I got it. There are some people in life who just know, 'I'm ready for the world. Let's go.' I knew that I had to be extremely prepared and I'm also very, very competitive. I was in sports, I was in tap. I didn't know I was competitive, I just always had this mindset that I could do it...and do it better. I was the kid who stayed after practice. I was the kid who was practicing during recess at school. When I was on a girls softball team I wanted to be able to hit a home run---I practiced over and over and over and over again. It's why I understand that Mike Tyson has that too. You have to, to become a world champion on that level. You have to have to have a belief in yourself. Even when you don't want to do it, you're going to do what needs to be done. At In Living Color, I was putting in twelve to fourteen hour days, five days a week, then I'd fly back to New York to go to the clubs to see what songs were hot or not. Nobody told me to do that, I did it because I wanted to be on top of my game.

In 1994, for your deeply powerful performance in Fearless, you received an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress. What do you remember about what you did for that film, in order to be that character? I remember not knowing how I was going to do it, but knowing that I was going to figure it out. The nervousness and the insecurity of not knowing how I was going to do it would sometimes trap me. Part of the technique that you learn [as an actor] is how to deal with the fear. You learn how to deal with the 'I don't have all the answers.' At the time, it wasn't easy figuring it out, but once I did, I would nail it. I would know I nailed it. I'd gotten it in take three, and [director] Peter Weir was like, 'We have to do it again." I said 'It's in take fucking three!' After we wrapped, he said to me, 'You're going to kill me. It was take three!' The thing about me is that I know when I hit it, and I also know when I don't. When I don't hit it, to this day---because that still still happens; it's just part of the process. I still have to learn not to not beat myself up about it, to literally say to myself, alright, Rose, calm down, you got this, just believe.

Do some actors have deeper connection to the human experience than others? The way that I grew up, I was always on the outside, watching. There were times when I would want to participate in the world and there were times when I didn't, because I knew the circumstance that I was in wasn't for me. My husband and I were talking about it just the other day. He was saying that it's crazy how he can walk into a room and see the feeling of inadequacy I might have being there. As a child, I didn't understand why people would get mad at me. Living in environments with people who I wasn't related to and who didn't necessarily love me but were caring for me because they have to, I'd see such dysfunction 24/7, and I would really see and understand human behavior. You begin to understand human behavior in a heartbeat. I've been an observer not by choice, but by circumstance. I'm very, very fortunate to have a great team who understand my insecurities and how I feel nervous in rooms where I feel like I don't fit in or belong. They're very, very supportive---intentionally--- [Laughs] because I have fired the people who don't get me, and it's nothing personal! A lot of people have misjudged me all my life, thinking I am extremely aloof. I can throw one of my reps a look without thinking, and they go, 'Rose, calm down. It's all right. You only have to be here for a little while, let's just get through it'. A lot of people don't know this about me. An actor once said to me, 'You are an enigma. You are not who I thought you were.'

What's story about your career that you've never told before? I was asked to present at the Tony Awards one year and I was very nervous. I didn't have the proper representation to guide me through the process. Thank goodness my cousin was with me, he kept saying, 'You got this, you got this!' But I was like, 'Shut up!!' They'd told all of the presenters that there was going be an opening number where we would all be on these kind of bleachers, and they told us to go and stand wherever we wanted. I thought to myself, oh my god. I felt like Linus from Charlie Brown in that moment. I was dying inside. And nobody had said hello to me; not one actor, not one performer. I have this stone-cold look on my face, my cousin is standing in the wings, saying 'Stop it!', because he knows me. But the look was just out of pure fear. So I'm standing there, no one's saying hi to me, literally there are all these are A-listers, and here comes Julia Roberts. Julia Roberts walks in late with that big smile, that big personality, she's very very charming and very very nice, and she's saying hello to everyone. I was looking down, thinking, I know she's not going to say hi to me, I don't know her. But she is saying hi to people she doesn't know. In my head, I thought, she's going to pass me over but she comes over and says, 'You're Rosie Perez.' I said, 'Yes, I'm Rosie Perez', and she goes, 'Yes, you are', and she grabbed my hand. She will probably never remember this. She said 'Yes, you are', because she saw how nervous I was and that my hand was literally shaking. I smiled and said, 'It's nice to meet you', and she said, 'It's nice to see you again.' That was the first time I'd heard the Hollywood phrase, 'It's nice to see you again.' So I said to her, 'Oh, have we met?', and she burst out laughing and said, 'Yes, you are the funny one, and it's nice to see you here." Ater she did that, all the people who had been ignoring me started saying things like 'Oh, Rosie, hi! Hi, Rosie, hi! We love Rosie!' Afterwards, my cousin said to me, 'I can't believe that shit happened!' And I remember this one actor saying, as we walked off, 'You're so cool when you walk into a room, you don't care what anybody says or if you talk to anybody. I wish I was like that.' He had no idea.

In Do The Right Thing you play Tina, and before the film even starts, you blow the roof off of things in a powerful opening sequence. Everyone knows I choreographed that, but I've always given full credit to Spike Lee. He had a vision---and it was intensity.

The White Men Can't Jump cast is such a cool eclectic mix, and it was a film that truly hit the zeitgeist in 1992. Did you know at the time that you were filming that there was magic happening? Both Woody and I knew we had instant chemistry, but it was Wesley Snipes who kept saying, on day one and throughout, 'This shit is gonna be big. This shit is gonna be fucking huge.' He saw it. That movie was pure joy and pure fun. The director [Ron Shelton] was very, very smart, allowing us freedom and looseness on set, something that is much needed on a comedy. We were just having fun, and it popped off the screen as such. There were takes where everyone would just die laughing afterwards. It was great fun, and a great experience. There are only two other times where I've had that much fun on a set or stage, but nothing really tops that experience. It was like the best summer camp, ever.

In your latest role as Denise on Apple TV+'s Before opposite Billy Crystal as Eli, there's a torture and a torment that permeates a screen with this element that is supernatural. It assumes that there might be a pre-life as opposed to an afterlife. You have been a part of projects that have been dark in terms of subject matter, but was it different in any way, preparing to play a mother whose son is being mentally and emotionally tortured in the way that Noah is? Yes it was, because I purposely wanted to create my character to be a nervous wreck. Her backstory is that she was once in the system herself, so she knows how it goes. She doesn't have any children of her own and she's of a certain age, so she's dedicating her life to this child. Even in her apartment everything is a bit excessive for Noah, though it's homey at the same time. That excess is what I'd picked up on when I walked onto set. And I wanted Denise to have a knowing; because she's older and more mature, she understands that she does not have all the answers. She doesn't want to fuck this kid up any further, she's so in love with this child, and she wants to give him everything she never had. I knew adults like that when I was a kid and I would pick up on their nervousness. I would pick up on that little glimmer of a tear that they were holding back when they would say hello to me; I would pick up on them holding back feelings. The people that were good were the ones that didn't pity me, and I tried to bring that to my character. There's no pity for this child---there's concern, there's worry..which is different from pity. It was very heavy. Shooting Before was really, really, really heavy.

Is there a way in which you decompress and release a role at the end of a day while shooting something like Before? The only film that stayed with me for a very long time, was Fearless. I couldn't shake it, and my sister Carmen called me on it. It depends upon the day of shooting. There were some days where I would go home and think, thank God the day is over. There were other days [while shooting Before] when I came home and I was completely silent, because the day was just a bit overwhelming. My husband was great, my daughter-in-law was great. People were great. I have a really great support system around me. My sister was great. Sometimes I would release [Denise] on my husband. I would just cry. My sister and my husband have been with me throughout my career, specifically my sister. My husband and I have been together for for such a long time. They both let me cry it out. Then I'm like, 'Okay, great, let's smoke a joint!' My sister will remind me, that I can't smoke; that's the rule I'd told them. When I'm working---no smoking.. I'm like, 'Goddammit!'

What specifically about how Denise views her relationship with her foster son, Noah, felt universal to you? When you grow up in the system, you understand that you've become a dented can. Noah is too young to understand that, and that the dents are not of his doing. That's where the love and the concern Denise has for Noah comes from. She wants to let him know, I'm not giving up on you. You are not going to be the can that's left on the shelf. My aunt taught me this. She's say, 'Go get the dented cans. They're dented but they're half price.' They're not rotten. It's good inside. They are the same thing as the undented cans. It's the supermarket that's stupid. Go get the dented cans, because once you open it up you'll see that it's good inside'.

Denise's relationship with Eli is a complicated one. How do you think it evolves over the course of the series? It evolves, really, when she decides. 'You need to put your big girl pants on.' The way I wanted to play it was, being an adult, you're not going go at this kid when you know all the stuff he's been through. You're not going to tell him he's being rude or, 'Don't do that, that's not nice.' It's about walking away, giving him space---but not giving up on him. Their relationship evolves once she decides not to be nervous and decides to find a solution. We don't know what the hell is going on, but we have to do something. That's her journey. I don't want to give anything away for the readers, but they both come to that point.

Do you believe in the supernatural in any way or was this like a total stretch for you? I don't know what I believe in because I also believe that there are so many things that can be possible. I was a child who loved science, I had an eighth grade science teacher who said he got a chance to go up in a rocket ship and he was able to see the earth above the stratosphere. He shared that it was the most humbling experience and that it made him feel, I think there's a god, but I don't know if there is a god. It made him feel that there's something bigger than all of us. We are just particles, packed together. I remember that well. I said, 'You don't believe in God?' I grew up in the Catholic church, and today, that type of teacher would have probably gotten fired. I was glad that he had that conversation with the class. I felt like he was just speaking to me and it never left me. As I got older, I thought, that guy was right. We don't have all the answers, and if we think we do, we're pretty pompous. There's so much to know, there's so much to learn. People say, well then that's faith and that's blind faith, and I say, but I have a scientific mind. What is so intriguing about Before is that nobody knew what the hell was going on, even when it was revealed at the end, the look on everyone's faces is, what did we just experience?