Rosie Perez embraces aging amid a career renaissance: 'Don’t count me down-and-out, honey'
When we met in early September on the eve of her 58th birthday, Rosie Perez had taken a redeye from Los Angeles to her New York City brownstone after a week of being on the set of Showtime’s popular drama "Your Honor," starring Bryan Cranston. The Brooklyn-born actress looked comfortable and flawless in a vintage muumuu, hair in two braids. Her long lashes, she chuckled, were from the show.
“I am embracing where I am at,” Perez says. “It’s nice and I like it a lot.”
Where she’s at can be best described as a career renaissance. Last year, the actress of Puerto Rican heritage was nominated for an Emmy for best supporting actress in HBO Max’s "The Flight Attendant." A few months later, she returned triumphantly to the Oscars in a stunning red Christian Siriano gown to present the best cinematography award with her two "White Men Can’t Jump" co-stars, Woody Harrelson and Wesley Snipes, after a 24-year absence. She had not been invited to the Academy Awards show since she was nominated in 1994 for her role as an airplane crash survivor battling PTSD in Peter Weir’s "Fearless."
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Perez confessed to "Variety" that it hurt “not even to sit in the audience, not to present, nothing – and I’m a member. I love the Academy Awards. I cheer on my peers, but it hurts. It’s like when your home team doesn’t ask you to come back into the stadium after you got up to bat and hit the home run.”
Returning right off an Emmy nod and with two old friends for the film’s 30-year reunion felt like a win.
“It was so nice, especially to get a standing ovation from your peers,” she says. She recalls strutting backstage where her husband of nine years, visual artist Eric Haze, was waiting after she presented. “We embraced and just cried,” she says. “He knew what the moment meant.”
Saying the right thing
The actress has not been shy about voicing the difficult journey navigating Hollywood is for actors of color, especially women, who like her, look ethnic. She began as a dancer and a choreographer for "In Living Color" and received three Emmy nominations. Her breakthrough role came in 1989 in Spike Lee’s "Do the Right Thing" when she was 25.
She has had steady work, including on the Broadway stage ("The Ritz"), in film ("Birds of Prey" and "The Take"), and on television. For a year in 2014, she co-hosted "The View."
Now nearing 60, and at a point when many actresses her age are invisible and fighting for dignified roles, she is working with some of her favorite artists. Her latest role is playing Olivia Delmont, an assistant district attorney, on limited series "Your Honor," starting its second and final season in December.
“I was offered the role on Friday and was expected on set on Monday, and I just didn’t think I could do it,” she says. “I need time to prepare, to research, but Bryan (Cranston) called and told me a story about a similar situation he encountered and promised that if I said yes, he would be there for me every step of the way. When I arrived on Sunday in LA, he met me for lunch at the hotel and broke down the script line-by-line for two hours.”
She beams: “It’s wonderful working with Bryan. He’s kind, a real pro, and good on his word.”
Perez believes in her herself, too. “Even when people would count me out, I would just sit back and say, ‘Just wait, it’s going to happen. I put the work in, I am at the gym every day and I never give up.’ But equally important is accepting where I am in life,” she says. “I am not the young ingenue, I do have wrinkles. Yes, I love Botox, I admit it, it’s the new mascara, even men are obsessed with it. But for this role, I didn’t have time to get it.”
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She adds: “I am older, which means I am not trying to compete for the younger roles and that is what drives most of my actor women friends nuts.”
“At first I wasn’t OK with it, I am going to be completely honest,” she says. “It took me a minute, then I came to the moment where I figured I am either going to fight something that is not worth fighting or I am going to embrace it and see how wonderful it could be. ... Just ride with it.”
It was a winning move that Perez says served her well.
“I am less worried about how I am looking on the screen and focused more on how I am going to deliver the spirit of a woman at this age, whether she has her life together or not,” she says.
Perez, who boxes several times a week with a professional trainer, says in her Brooklyn accent: “Don’t count me down-and-out, honey.” She says she is the one in charge of when she calls it quits from acting. “I am getting ready for the next championship round. Only I will tell you when I am going to hand in the gloves. You won’t tell me.”
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Fighting the good fight
An activist, Perez uses her star power to amplify causes she cares about – from voting rights to health care.
After 27 years as artistic chair of the Urban Arts Partnership, a New York City public school nonprofit she co-founded that uses the arts to close the achievement gap, she stepped down.
During the height of the AIDS epidemic, Perez was a powerful voice on behalf of women and children, demanding additional funding and better services. She suffered many losses to the virus, including her mother in 1999. In 2010, President Barack Obama appointed her to the Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS.
Perez was arrested in the early 2000s for disorderly conduct for protesting the U.S. Navy’s live bombing exercises near residential areas of Vieques, one of the smaller islands that make up the Puerto Rico archipelago. After years of community pressure, the Navy left the island in 2003. Most recently, during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, Perez was part of the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s effort urging New York-area commuters to mask up.
She gets involved in the community because “we are supposed to do that, that is our responsibility,” she says. “There were a handful of adults in my life that gave (back) because they knew that it was what they were supposed to do in life. They knew that it is the true calling of a human being.”
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Navigating the holidays
Perez is looking forward to the holidays, when she plans to spend much of her time in the kitchen.
“I love it – especially my pies. I think I am one of the best pie makers in the world,” she laughs. “I am not trying to brag; they are that good.”
Cooking is therapeutic for Perez because it brings her back to her beloved tía’s kitchen.
“As children, we didn’t have a lot, but it was really always about the food – and it’s very Puerto Rican – that whoever comes to your house is fed and is fed well. If all we could offer was rice with gandules or a pastel, so be it. If you came to our house, you were warm, you were fed and there was a lot of laughs and dancing.”
She adds: “I love the Christmas season. ... I love the cold, the lights and how everyone says ‘Merry Christmas’ and they are happy and nice.”
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This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Rosie Perez addresses aging, Botox and her Hollywood longevity
