In the latest film, Netflix’s I Care A Lot, Eiza González breaks a lot of norms, and for that, the actress is grateful.
“It was fun for me to play a role that I hadn’t done before and hadn’t been allowed to play too because of the predisposed ideas of what I should be playing,” the Mexican actress revealed in an exclusive interview with ETOnline.
“And it was fun to have a director that broke those norms with me,” she says, adding, “Yes, [I didn’t have to be the token Latina].”
I Care A Lot follows Marla (Rosamund Pike), a woman who manipulates the court into appointing her to be the legal guardian of elderly people to fleece them for everything they’re worth. With the help of business partner and lover Fran (González), they find a wealthy retiree with seemingly no living heirs or family, and end up finding out that she has ties to a powerful gangster, and Fran and Marla are in over their heads.
The show’s premise made Gonzalez intrigued, however, it was the boundary pushing on telling a unique approach to “unlikeable women.”
“[People] like to throw that word around a lot. I even heard people who have seen [I Care A Lot], they’re like, ‘She can’t fall into being unlikeable.’ And I’m like, ‘Why, because you’re not used to seeing women redeem themselves?’ And I think that’s sad. It’s a perfect display of what society has dictated for women for such a long time, and I love that it’s challenging it.”
She also got a major shock when she learned that the storyline involved conservatorships, a concept almost unknown to Latinos.
“When I learned about the script and educated myself about the story, I was really shook. I was shaken by it. I was just disturbed because, [as a] Latina, we grew up differently. We’re educated, like, your parents grow old, you take care of them and they live with you, and that’s just how it is. So this mentality of putting them in a guardianship and putting them in care homes is really new to me and it’s a very other-country mentality that I don’t connect with.”