Adria Arjona knows just how scary it can be to meet your heroes. One of her all-time favourite movies is School Of Rock, and when she first met Richard Linklater, not even the relative safety of a Zoom call could save her. “My hands were sweaty,” she admits to Empire. “I was really trying to play it cool and that lasted for about ten minutes.”
After a series of supporting turns in genre fare (Pacific Rim: Uprising, Good Omens), crime dramas (True Detective), and recently as the forthright Bix in Andor, the 31-year-old actor is stepping into fresh territory with Linklater’s romcom HitMan. Alongside Glen Powell, she stars as Madison, a housewife with a controlling husband who falls for the contract killer (Powell) she hires to take him out. The only problem: her new boyfriend is actually working undercover for the police as a fake hitman.
Arjona’s interest in acting was first fostered by another one of her heroes: Gena Rowlands, the trailblazing actor and key collaborator of John Cassavetes. “I admire her spontaneity,” Arjona explains. “I try my best to recreate it, but I don’t even get to her ankles. Maybe one day when I’m 80 years old, I’ll get to four per cent of Gena Rowlands’ capacity.” Her desire to act motivated her to move to New York when she was 18, where she worked double shifts as a waitress while studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Theatre And Film Institute. Two years later she started landing small TV roles, before her breakthrough gig as Taylor Kitsch’s harried partner Emily on the second season of True Detective
“We created a space for us to play and be weird and sexy and funny.”
It was Hit Man, however, that allowed for the spontaneity she was so drawn to, particularly when it came to her partnership with Powell. “It was supposed to be a one-hour meeting,” she says of the first time they sat down together. “We ended up talking for five hours.” The pair’s spark is the film’s driving force, and Arjona found freedom in their collaboration: “Chemistry comes from trust, and I think from our first meeting I just knew I could trust [Glen]. We created a space for us to play and be weird and sexy and funny.”
Madison is literal galaxies apart from Arjona’s current stint as the driven mechanic Bix in Andor, but the actor’s recent trajectory suggests she has an appetite for women who refuse to go down without a fight. The second season of the Star Wars spin-off — which has just finished shooting — joins Bix after she’s been brutally tortured at the hands of the Imperial Guard, and is now on the lam. “I think [creator] Tony Gilroy’s writing is so smart that wherever people think my character’s journey is going to go, it’s ten times more complex than what people imagine,” she teases.