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Melissa Barrera on ‘Carmen,’ Paul Mescal, and ‘Scream VI’


Melissa Barrera never had a backup plan. Six years ago, when the then-27-year-old actress moved from Mexico City to Hollywood, she was burned out on the country’s telenovela scene, and frustrated at the lack of opportunities to take on more varied roles. She knew moving to the U.S. would mean rebuilding her career from the ground up, but she was fully prepared to start over. In fact, it’s exactly what she wanted.

“I felt jaded,” she says. “The things I wanted to be doing, they wouldn’t have even let me in the room for. I was working constantly, but I was never doing anything that gave me the ‘value’ of becoming a name [in Mexico]. I needed to go somewhere where no one knew me, where I could start fresh. They’d just see me in a room, and I’d have to bring it.”

It didn’t take long for Barrera to establish herself as a star on the rise. Over the last five years, she jumped from her breakout role as Lyn on the critically-acclaimed Starz series Vida (her third-ever audition in the U.S.) to leading roles in Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical blockbuster In the Heights and, most recently, the Scream reboots. This year, she reprised her role as Sam Carpenter, illegitimate daughter of the original Ghostface killer, in Scream VI, and will be flexing her musical muscles again in Carmen, an operatic love story directed and co-written by French choreographer Benjamin Millepied, out now in theaters.

melissa barrera

Sarah Krick

Catching her breath for a minute back in her hometown of Monterrey, Barrera is bracing herself for the coming months, and reflecting on how much her life has changed since she first left Mexico in 2017. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘One day I’ll win an Oscar,’” she says. “I was just going to go, audition every day, and book something fast. I told myself I was moving and not coming back, that was my mindset.”

Maybe it was that singular focus that allowed everything to fall into place so quickly. Around the same time that Barrera landed Vida, she also put herself on tape for In the Heights and Carmen. It would be years before either of those roles came to fruition, and in Hollywood, it’s not rare for projects to drag on or even die. But Barrera held onto them. “Looking back on things, it’s like everything happened so quickly,” she says. “But in the moment, it didn’t feel like a rollercoaster, it felt like I was on a teacup ride just spinning and trying to figure out where I was.”

When it came to Scream, that was an opportunity that truly surprised her. She’d been a horror fanatic as a kid, and loved the feeling of riding an adrenaline rush with whoever was in the theater. More than that though, she loved the idea of Sam Carpenter, the trauma-ridden daughter of Billy Loomis. Barrera welcomes a challenge, and the idea of exploring the psyche of a woman burdened by her father’s past was too exciting to pass up. “There was so much that I wanted to do,” she says. Going into Scream V, she knew the story would focus more on Jenna Ortega’s Tara, her half-sister, but Scream VI gave her a chance to dig deeper. “I wanted to see Sam having fun and smiling,” she says. “What’s her relationship like with her newfound family? Can she be more than this hard shell of a person we saw last time? I just wanted to give her more color. She’s such an unpredictable character and that’s always fun to play.”

melissa barrera “sam carpenter”, left, and jenna ortega “tara carpenter” stars in paramount pictures and spyglass media group's "scream vi"

Melissa Barrera as Sam Carpenter and Jenna Ortega as Tara Carpenter in Scream VI.

Philippe Bossé/Paramount Pictures

It wasn’t until after Scream V’s release last year that Barrera realized that, between herself and Ortega, two Latinas were now at the helm of one of the biggest horror franchises of the last 25 years. “We don’t ever speak Spanish, or justify our existence in Woodsboro,” she says. “In the world of this franchise, we just exist. It’s a different kind of representation, and I love that we’re just allowed to be.”

Carmen exists on the other side of the spectrum. A two-hour drama, the film follows Barrera’s Carmen, who flees her native Mexico after the murder of her mother. As she journeys across the Mexican desert, Aidan (Paul Mescal), a former Marine, puts himself in danger when he decides to help her. Millepied’s feature debut, Carmen is a reimagining of an opera of the same name, and is told, in part, through beautifully dreamlike musical sequences.

It’s epic, romantic, and for Barrera, a story she’s been holding onto since she came to the U.S. herself. “I heard about the project when I first moved to L.A., it was one of the first self-tapes that I did,” she says. Barrera was immediately drawn in by the magical realism of the film. She called her team the second she read the description, but didn’t hear anything back for months. “I figured they didn’t like me,” she says. Then came the offer to meet with Millepied.

melissa barrera

Barrera in Carmen.

Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

Sitting outside of his L.A. Dance Project studio, they talked over the role, and a few days later, he asked to see her dance. It took a few years for the project to gain momentum, and for them to find the right person to cast opposite Barrera—Mescal’s casting was announced seven months after the premiere of Normal People. “Because it was such a long process, a lot of people would tell me it was never gonna happen,” she remembers. “But I knew in my heart that it was too special of a project. We’ve seen stories about people crossing the border, but the way that [Millepied] wanted to tell it through music and movement, dance, and romance, I’d never seen anything like that.”

From the beginning, she felt the film had the potential to get people to empathize, to step out of what they thought they knew about immigrant stories. “I think that was my initial draw to this project,” she says. “How can I help create empathy in a world that seems so withdrawn and so blind to so many people that are going through this?”

Filmed in early 2021 in Sydney, Australia, the country was under strict Covid-19 prevention protocols when Barrera and Mescal first arrived. Instructed to quarantine in their hotel rooms for the first two weeks of their arrival, the two first met over FaceTime. “I’m pretty good about being sedentary, but Paul is not,” she says laughing. “Every time he would FaceTime me, he was pacing like a lion, it was so funny.”

melissa barrera and paul mescal in carmen

Barrera and Paul Mescal in Carmen.

Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics

Post-quarantine, they got to work on dancing. Because so much of the film is told through movement, it was critical for them to build up that chemistry before they began shooting. “Dancing with someone is so intimate, so personal,” she says. “We were just learning to trust each other at first, and it was a beautiful way to get to know each other. I got into character through Carmen’s body first. So once I got to set, I already knew how she moved, how she walked.”

Though Carmen’s story is a world away from her own path to the U.S., Barrera is hopeful audiences will walk away having connected with her. “I hope that people find empathy within themselves for the journey this woman is going on to seek a better, safer life,” she says. “But I also hope that people just let go and experience the movie. If you let yourself, you’ll feel breathless, you’ll feel shocked, and moved. Half of the movie is in Spanish, and it doesn’t matter if you don’t speak it, because you can feel how powerful it is. I hope people allow themselves to feel that.”

Headshot of Cat Cardenas

Cat Cardenas is an Austin-based writer and photographer covering entertainment and Latinx culture. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, GQ, Variety, the New York Times, and more. Follow Cat on Twitter and Instagram @catrcardenas.



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