Rosa Salazar: ‘Is my life story true? Of course it is. Is it sensational? Yeah’

Rosa Salazar never meant to do Hollywood first. After a tumultuous childhood, a period spent living out of her car, and a stint in standup comedy, the wily American actor formulated a plan. “I was going to earn my stripes with theatre, and then TV, and then I was going to do movies...” she says. “None of that happened.”

Instead, within just a few years of starting out, Salazar was neck-deep in the business of blockbusters. Supporting roles in large-scale films like The Divergent Series: Insurgent (2015), Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015), and Netflix’s Bird Box (2018) led to a starring one: the title part in James Cameron’s Alita: Battle Angel, playing an all-action cyborg in a child’s body. Co-starring Christoph Waltz, Jennifer Connelly and Mahershala Ali, Alita was somehow both an ardently pored-over cult object and a considerable commercial success. (It made $405m – more money, for example, than the first Toy Story.) It was a big film, and Salazar was the moon-eyed, CGI-rendered face of it.

Cut to half a decade later, and movie stardom had begun to tire. “I needed to prove to myself that I still liked acting,” she tells me. “When you’re on a set, there’s only so many books you can read between takes before you start thinking, ‘Am I acting? Is this acting? Or is this just handing in a set of “deliverables” for an editor to piece together later on?’” It was, she said, a “lack of process”; her grand career plan had gone out the window. “I wanted to do theatre so desperately, and I kept saying that, and saying that, and saying that. And once I got my foot in the door, there was no way my foot was moving. I was like a Jehovah’s Witness,” the 40-year-old adds, scrappy and satisfied.

If Salazar seems buoyant today, it’s because she finally got her wish. We’re meeting in one of the uppermost rooms of London’s Old Vic theatre, where she’s been rehearsing Glengarry Glen Ross, a gender-flipped production of David Mamet’s bullish Pulitzer-winning drama, directed by Patrick Marber. (She’s wearing a sweater-vest, shirt, and baseball cap: it’s an outfit that manages to scream “I’m in rehearsals” while still being quite enviably chic.) Opposite British actor Indira Varma (a recent standout in the BBC’s The Other Bennett Sister), Salazar plays sharky, smarmy real-estate agent Ricky Roma, one of several sellers caught up in a cutthroat battle for dominance. The play is one of those quintessential dramas seeking to rubble the myth of the American Dream – a study of avarice, ambition, and the prosaic tragedies of the 20th-century everyday.

This is the second set of boards Salazar has crept this year: a few months ago, she was holding her own alongside Billy Crudup and Denise Gough in a West End staging of the western High Noon. She describes that play as a “breaking of the ice”: “The journalists were saying, ‘For a film actress, she really did OK!’ There’s a sense of proving that I respect this tradition. But now I want to get to a deeper level.”

This Glengarry is, says Salazar, a “grand experiment”. “I’m very excited to say these words that are normally reserved for a group of – for all intents and purposes – white men,” she explains. None of the pronouns are changed from Mamet’s script, a decision that Salazar says “allows the text to be sacrosanct”. “We’re saying, does this message stand up when it’s being told by a group of women? I’m obviously American, and I know this to be true: the capitalist machine grinds the same meat, no matter what body you put into it. Man or woman, we’re all victims of this machine.”

What the casting does do is bring out new meanings in the dialogue: Salazar cites a moment when Levine (Varma) says to Williamson (Dorothea Myer-Bennett): “You’re just a secretary.” “You know, when doing this play, I’m like, ‘It’s all about reclamation.’ But when I hear that line, I think, ‘Oh my God, that’s way more vicious when it’s said by a woman to another woman.’ We’re not reclaiming s***! It’s more b****-eat-b****.”

For Salazar, “learning to speak Mamet” was its own challenge. Not just the swear-laden, testosteronic language that performers must make sing (the cast of the 1992 film adaptation famously christened it “Death of a F***in’ Salesman”), but the stop-start, naturalistic rhythms of it. She likens it to jazz, and the process of learning it to the film Whiplash. “That’s what it felt like!” she says. “You know, JK Simmons in the corner, going, ‘You’re rushing! You’re lagging! You’re f***ing rushing!’ Throwing cymbals at my forehead...”

There is, what’s more, a lot of history in a character like Ricky Roma, who has been played by names such as Kieran Culkin, Joe Mantegna, and Liev Schreiber; in the Nineties film, he was portrayed by an Oscar-nominated Al Pacino. “I know a lot of actors are like, ‘I don’t watch past performances, I don’t listen, I don’t blah blah blah... I don’t want it to inform my process.’ I am not like that at all,” says Salazar. “I love the information. I love to steep myself in the vibe. I’m able to dissociate that [the movie adaptation] is a cool film that I really liked as a child. I went back and I watched it recently, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, so many f***ing heavyweights in this thing! It moves liquid-fast.’”

Hang on, hang on, I interject. As a child?

“Yeah,” she grins. “My mom introduced me to things very early. I remember going to school as a young child, and being asked, ‘What’s your favourite movie?’ And I said, ‘Disclosure!’ They said, ‘Isn’t that the movie where Demi Moore frames Michael Douglas for rape?’ I was like, ‘Yeah! Great film!’”

She laughs. “One of the best gifts my mom ever gave me was to expose me to film, any film, at a very young age. It was a sense of autonomy, artistically, that I think shapes everything I do.”

Salazar was born in Washington, DC, the child of working-class parents. Her father worked for the Washington transit authority, her mother as a purchasing manager for a luxury hotel. Both of Salazar’s parents were activists – another thing they instilled in her. They divorced when she was a child, but remained close. She says that her father worked “backbreaking labour” at the company for around 35 years, but “couldn’t exceed the glass ceiling because he was a dark-skinned Peruvian immigrant”.

After he passed away in 2012, she would find court documents online relating to a discrimination lawsuit her father had won, having been “racially targeted” by his employer. When it comes to her mother, meanwhile, Salazar saw “what it did to her, being a woman in the workplace... the oppression that occurs, the misogyny that is just so blatant, inherent, insidious. I witnessed that firsthand, too.”

I knew I had done well if I got the phrase, ‘You should write a book’

Salazar says she had a “very chaotic upbringing”, up until she was eventually placed in foster care. “My mother had a very bad relationship, and I kept running away from home,” she says. At 15, after around two years in care, she was emancipated – given legal independence from her parents and guardians.

There is nonetheless a defiant compassion in the way Salazar speaks about her parents. “Did things fall apart here and there? Yes,” she says. “No one is perfect. But what both of them instilled in me in terms of art, and what they fed me, was all fertile, and important.”

Years later, after she had moved to New York and decided to pursue acting, she would turn the disorder of her upbringing into a sales pitch. “In the thousands of general meetings I was in, I had my story so rehearsed,” she says. “I knew exactly what points to hit. I would would tell them, ‘I’m an emancipated youth, I was in foster care, I had a rough beginning from a very young age, I had to raise myself, I had to be super-reliant, and hypervigilant, and have full-time jobs and pull myself up by my bootstraps. That’s how I learned how to talk to people. That’s how I learned how to survive.’

“And it started to become this thing,” she adds, “where, at the end of every conversation, I knew I had done well if I got the phrase ‘You should write a book.’ Now, is my life story true? Of course it is. Is it sensational? Yeah. We’re all unreliable narrators, and we’re all selling something. And in that respect, I’m just selling the make-up of who I am.” It is, she concedes, very Ricky Roma.

This strategy might well explain how Salazar landed a role like Alita from a position of relative obscurity. She is, to use some dreadful Hollywoodspeak, very good in a room. This much is obvious – across all manner of topics, she comes across as smart, wry, and interesting.

We go through some of the touchstones of her oeuvre. The 2015 indie film Night Owls – perhaps her best film performance, a coruscating depiction of a woman on the brink. Then Alita – she mentions she’s been “been talking a lot” with James Cameron about a potential sequel. I start to ask about last year’s ill-fated Marvel film Captain America: Brave New World, for which she recorded scenes as a supervillain. She was excised from the finished cut entirely, alongside co-star Seth Rollins, when the dismally received franchise film underwent extensive reshoots. She interrupts before I get halfway through the title. “Next. Next question,” she says, cheery but firm. She doesn’t feel like she has any relationship to that film, she remarks.

When we circle back round to Glengarry Glen Ross, Salazar is as animated as when we sat down an hour ago – I get the sense she could talk about this play for days on end. “I think the expectation that people have about this quote-unquote ‘all-female’ Glengarry is that we are putting lipstick on it,” she enthuses. “But that is not what we’re doing. For the first time ever, there aren’t just five guys yelling at each other on stage for an hour and a half. There are five women talking about the capitalist machine. And I think it upholds the point that Mamet was trying to make in the first place.”

As she talks, she starts gesticulating with her hands, balling them into fists. Silver-tongued Ricky Roma is gone; Salazar, the child of activists, is now all frankness and fury. “It isn’t about men. It isn’t about women. What is the thing plaguing us all? Capitalism,” she says. “That’s the bigger message. Man, woman, black, white, yellow... the only thing that matters is green.

“That’s why this experiment [Glengarry] works so well, because we all know how that feels. Especially right now...” she smiles darkly. “We’re all f***ed.”

‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ is on at the Old Vic until 18 July

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