“Good Trouble” star Zuri Adele remembers how she felt watching Kerry Washington grace the small screen as Olivia Pope in “Scandal.”
“[It] changed my life to see a Black woman leading like that on television,” she told TheWrap during a recent interview. “I think the shows that impacted me the most were like the ensemble shows, particularly with Black people at the forefront, normalizing my experience rather than trying to fit myself into another experience.”
Adele was joined by several of her co-stars from the Freeform series for a chat with TheWrap ahead of the Season 4B premiere, including Tommy Martinez, Priscilla Quintana, Sherry Cola, Emma Hunton, Josh Pence and Cierra Ramirez. They agreed that, growing up, they were hard pressed to find characters on screen who they could look up to — a problem they’re trying to solve for future generations.
“When I was on the bigger side, I had never seen anybody like me on screen,” said Hunton, whose character Davia has been on a deeply personal self love journey throughout the series. She added that, while there were certainly actresses whose careers she admired (like Goldie Hawn and Melissa McCarthy), there weren’t many plus-size characters who were treated with humanity.
“Certainly not [anyone] blow drying their hair naked in front of the mirror confidently,” she said. “Being bigger, being fat was always a punchline in a show. People were never really humanized.”
Cierra Ramirez thanks Milla Jovovich’s turn in “Resident Evil” for inspiring her to be an actor, but she admits there wasn’t much of a blue print for her either. Ramirez plays Mariana, a Latina woman with a degree from MIT who now works as a software engineer launching her own beauty app.
Recounting her character’s accolades, she tells TheWrap: “I think that that’s what’s so beautiful about ‘Good Trouble’ is we’re really breaking stereotypes and giving people a voice.”
For Pence, it was the emotional vulnerability of men that was missing from most of the characters he grew up watching that he now infuses into his character Dennis, who has been grieving the loss of his child and the end of his marriage, navigating his struggles with mental health, and learning how to lean on others in times of need.
“I really appreciate being able to show a vulnerable man, a man dealing with depression, with loss, with grief,” he said, noting that his career has been inspired by Heath Ledger, who “would invent roles and create a vulnerability that wasn’t always necessarily on screen.”
“Even in something as simple as ’10 Things I Hate About You,’ ‘Brokeback Mountain,’ I mean, the guy just always — there was such a humanity and something torn in his soul that was so beautiful to watch,” he said.
While reflecting on his co-stars’ answers, Martinez told TheWrap that his wasn’t able to turn to television much during his youth. Now that he’s able to portray character like Gael, who is a bisexual Latino learning to navigate a tumultuous relationship with his family, he’s taking notes.
“I had too much s— to figure out on my own and find a direction in my life that I didn’t really have much time to really sit down and watch a lot of things,” Martinez said. “But, I have learned so much through the writing that they give Gael in terms of standing up for all the things that matter the most.”
Season 4B of “Good Trouble” debuts Thursday at 10 p.m. on Freeform.
