'Roma' star Yalitza Aparicio is so much more than her Oscar fairy tale
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. - It's a story that reads like a fairy tale: Yalitza Aparicio, a young pedagogical student attends a casting call in her hometown of Tlaxiaco, Mexico, at the urging of her older sister. Somehow she gets the role - which is not just any role but the lead in the critically acclaimed "Roma," directed by Mexican filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron. The story doesn't end there. Aparicio not only lands an Oscar nomination for leading actress, she becomes only the second Mexican actress and the first indigenous woman ever to do so.
On a cloudy Friday afternoon early this month, Aparicio, 25, sits resplendent in a geometric print dress, her black hair smooth and gleaming as she sips a glass of pineapple juice in a tony West Hollywood hotel. To say that she never imagined where that casting call would lead is a vast understatement. Aparicio says she had figured that after she completed post-production work on "Roma," she'd go back to Tlaxiaco and never see Cuaron or the rest of the movie team again.
"But he told me that he would keep seeing me," she says in Spanish with a wry smile. "I thought he was joking, and I even laughed. But the casting director, Luis Rosales, used to also tell me all the time: 'Just wait, there is more to come. You will see.'"
That also was an understatement.
