How hard was it to get back into acting after college?
I got very lucky. When you graduate from a Bachelor of Fine Arts program, you do a showcase, so like Juilliard, UCLA, Carnegie Mellon, etc. and you get two to five minutes to perform for industry people. My agent that came to that showcase is still my agent today. He propped me up right from the start, and I luckily was able to do Shameless pretty quickly right after graduating.
And when did you and your husband, Mark, meet?
We actually met when I was doing Shameless. We were filming in Chicago, and he was playing with the Bears at the time, so he was living in Chicago. But we both went to USC, both actually born at the same hospital, both Hispanic, a lot of weird things. He fell in love with me immediately. I’m just kidding. [Laughs] He didn’t, but we dated for a while even though we were always kind of apart because I was filming In the Dark in Toronto for four years, and he was still playing. It only took six years to get engaged. And then we’ve been married for about two years and had twins in March.
Were you pregnant when you were filming Chad Powers?
Yes, I was. We finished when I was mid-second trimester or something. And the twins are six months now.
Wow. That’s incredible. Switching gears to the football of it all, since your husband was playing at the same time as Peyton and Eli Manning, who are executive producers on Chad Powers, did you or he know them prior to the series?
Yeah, he has a really fun relationship with them because I think he beat one of them in a game. He had some pretty crazy wins over their teams and AFC Championships or something like that. But they have a really fun relationship. And yet, nobody from the creative side knew my kind of connection to the football world until after the fact, I think. But it’s been fun for Mark to be able to chat with them about the show as we were filming.
Had you seen these short films that Eli had done before?
No, actually. And I was filming Long Bright River playing a heroin addict at the time in New York when I got the audition for Chad Powers, this football comedy. It was crazy to be in that world and then do this audition for something that’s the complete opposite. But the dialogue came so natural to me. I zipped through the script because it flowed so well and it made me laugh so hard. I was just like, “This is one of the best pilots I’ve ever read.” Then I had quite a few rounds of auditions for that, and flew back to L.A. for testing. I did a couple of my tests with Glen via Zoom, but to make it even more [surreal], I knew his little sister because she sang at our wedding.
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