Stephanie Beatriz is excited to show fans the final season of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. The 40-year-old actress, who has played Detective Rosa Diaz since the show began in 2013, spoke with ET’s Deidre Behar about filming the last season of the hit comedy.
“It’s been really, really fun on set and also sometimes randomly one of us will get teary-eyed or burst into tears because we’ve all been together for eight seasons and we all grew up a lot on the show,” Beatriz told ET at the premiere of her new film, In the Heights. “We grew up together and it was really a master class of studying comedy, for me, studying acting.”
She went on to compare the final days on set to a “weird fever dream,” saying of the cast, which includes Andy Samberg, Terry Crews, Melissa Fumero, and Joe Lo Truglio, “We’re trying to stay present and enjoy it as much as possible and make each other laugh.”
As for what fans can expect when the series returns, Beatriz teases that the 99th precinct will be taking on present-day issues, hinting that they could be dealing with systemic and institutional problems as a whole.
“One of the things that the show does very well is it takes these moments that are actually happening in the world and looks at them through the lens of, well, what if all the people who had to deal with, essentially, this crap, were actually really good people, like the people that work in that precinct,” she explained. “How do they dismantle systems that no longer work or maybe haven’t worked forever? How do they show up for each other as friends but also show up for their community at large. I think you’re going to get a lot of really great, satisfying, really funny moments in the last season.”
Beatriz is also playing salon worker Carla in the new film adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning musical, In the Heights. Beatriz, who is openly bisexual, is excited that her character is in a same-sex relationship with fellow salon worker Daniela (Daphne Rubin-Vega), in the film — a change from the Broadway show.
“In the original production, Carla and Daniela were simply work partners, but in this iteration, [screenplay writer] Quiara [Alegria Hudes] and [director] John [M. Chu] and [original playwright] Lin-[Manuel Miranda] all felt really strongly that they should be life partners are well,” Beatriz shared. “What’s really great for me as someone who is queer, as a member of the queer community, who is bisexual, is to see that rep in a film where it’s just layered into the community, sort of in the background. And they’re this really functional, fun, happy, funny couple that just happen to be gay.”
