Adria Arjona has recalled the surprising note director Zoë Kravitz gave her on Blink Twice and says that Tony Gilroy “really outdid himself” on the second/final season of Andor.
Arjona returns to the big screen next Friday in Zoë Kravitz’s well-received directorial debut, Blink Twice. She plays a former Survivor contestant named Sarah, who’s a part of a group of women that accept an invitation to the private island getaway of tech mogul Slater King (Channing Tatum). The latter has just re-emerged following his “cancellation,” and the psychological thriller explores what happens when the wrong lessons are learned from the #MeToo movement.
Arjona’s Sarah initially brings her competitive reality-show mindset to the proceeding, but she soon realizes that she’s going to have to support her fellow female guests, including Naomi Ackie’s Frida, if she’s going to make it out of this chilling situation. Arjona admits that she had a tough time playing the more cutthroat version of Sarah in the first act.
“I remember Zoë was like, ‘Adria, you’ve got to be bitchier.’ And I was like, ‘That’s as bitchy as I get!’ And she was like, ‘You’ve got to go bitchier,’” Arjona tells The Hollywood Reporter. “Then I would go again, and she’d be like, ‘Okay, that was better, but more.’ And I was like, ‘More!?’ So that was a big challenge for me in the introduction of the character, and we just laughed about it.”
Kravitz also didn’t strike Arjona as a first-time director given her adaptive directing style.
“She shapeshifted her direction and gave all of us a different style of attention,” Arjona says. “She clocked it really quick: ‘Oh, Adria works like this, or this resonates with Adria, and this resonates with Naomi [Ackie].’ So I thought that was really smart and empathetic of her.”
After the rapturous response to Andor season one, season two has inevitably become one of Lucasfilm’s most anticipated projects in the Disney era, and while Arjona herself was skeptical that creator Tony Gilroy could top himself, she’s delighted to report that he’s done exactly that.
“Oh man, when I read season one, I pinched myself, and when I started reading season two, I was like, ‘[Tony Gilroy] can’t outdo [season one].’ I was again like, ‘It’s not going to be as good.’ But it’s fucking better. It’s so much better. It is,” Arjona insists. “What he has crafted and created is mind-blowing, and I can’t believe I got to be a part of it. He’s so talented, and he really outdid himself for season two.”
Read the interview in full here, and stream the first season of Andor exclusively on Disney+ now, with the second/final season due in 2025.
Image: Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images
