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Not here for Gina Rodriguez‘s half-shaved head? Well, she’s not here for your hate! The Jane the Virgin star shared some powerful words about inner and outer beauty inside in her new cover story for the October issue of Latina magazine.
“I think it all plays into the idea of being your own hero and not feeling like you have to live up to other people’s expectations,” Rodriguez, 32, who often shares inspiring messages on her feel-good Instagram page, told the mag.
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The Golden Globes–winning actress then added a strong statement to anyone who has negative opinions about her bold hair makeover, which she underwent for her upcoming film Annihilation: “I am not my beauty. Who I am is not my f—cking hair, and to be an actor is to transform. To represent a community is to commit, to give my entire all.”
Indeed, community — especially the one she has created with her Latino fan base — is something Rodriguez values, as she’s proven time and again with her #MovementMondays, when she spotlights other Latinos she finds inspiring.
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In fact, when she auditioned for the role of Andrea Fleytas, a young oil rig worker, in her big-screen debut, Deepwater Horizon, supporting her fellow Latino actors was her top priority. “Andrea Fleytas is a real-life hero, who’s a Latina from California, and I thought for her not to be portrayed by a Latino would have been devastating,” Rodriguez told Latina. “It didn’t need to be me. I told [director Peter Berg], It can be any Latina out there crushing it and killing the game.”
And she isn’t the only one spreading the positivity. Rodriguez discovered the same kind of uplifting attitude in her Deepwater Horizon costar Mark Wahlberg, who, she says, completely understood her journey.
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“One thing I find extremely empowering about Mark is that he doesn’t want to do it alone. He wants to help everyone around him, uplift everyone around him,” she told the mag. “Mark understands that he got to where he was because of all the people that helped him get there, including himself. He got me. He got the idea that shit was hard and I pushed through. It wasn’t just hard as a Latina, it wasn’t just hard as a curvy leading lady, but it was hard as a woman. It was hard as somebody that came from the hood. He gets the struggle, and he could see it in someone else.”
