Camila Mendes Is Acting Authentically

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While Camila Mendes looks back fondly on her breakout role as Veronica Lodge on Riverdale, the CW show that ran from 2017 to 2023, she isn’t lingering on the past. To be fair, she doesn’t really have time to. “It was a formative time in my life,” she says. “I learned so much and really got my training wheels on that show, so it prepared me for what’s next.” Before the show aired its series finale in Aug. 2023, she already had six film acting credits under her belt.

Some of those credits include Palm Springs, the Andy Samberg and Cristin Milioti-led rom-com on Hulu, and Do Revenge, a Netflix teen dark comedy centered around Mendes’ character Drea, a scholarship kid at an elite private school, who teams up with reserved tomboy Eleanor (played by Maya Hawke) to carry out each other’s plan for revenge on the people who have wronged them.

Mendes, 30, is no stranger to playing a confident, seemingly unshakable, popular high school girl with complex emotions and motivations. But sometimes, she says, it can be “exhausting” to generate that kind of self-assuredness. “I think it’s hard to play characters that are really confident because you really need to believe it, and you need to be so confident with your lines and deliver them with a snippy rhythm,” she says. “When I’m playing characters more like me, it’s a different energy.” After her dad watched her as the ambitious but out-of-place Ana Santos in Prime Video’s rom-com Upgraded, she said he told her it was nice to see her play a character truer to who she is.

Mendes says that, while she’s not looking to play only Latina characters, she always tries to infuse some sort of Latinidad into her roles so they feel more authentic to her. In Do Revenge and Upgraded, she was able to get the characters’ names changed to root them in Latin heritage, she says. Most recently, she co-starred alongside Rudy Mancuso in the Prime Video-distributed Música, a movie she described as a celebration of Brazilian culture. She felt the weight of responsibility trying to do two things at once: provide positive representation for an underrepresented group and do it in a way that feels real and not forced. “It’s really hard to walk that line. But who better to walk that line than two Brazilians who do that every day?” she says. “If you stick to being authentic to yourself, then you can’t really go wrong.”