When you think of the gambit of nerdy things that have come out this summer, having Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts back to back is pretty cool. Being a part of both of them though? That’s an amazing feat and that’s what happened with Luna Lauren Vélez’s summer! The actress returns to Across the Spider-Verse as Rio Morales, Miles’ mother, and she debuted as Breanna Diaz, the mother of Noah (Anthony Ramos) and Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez).
Getting to talk with Vélez after the release of them both, it’s clear that she loves being a part of these worlds. I asked what it felt like going from Across the Spider-Verse and switching gears to Rise of the Beasts. “I don’t think I have switched gears,” she said. “I feel like I’m just rolling with it. You kind of have to, they’re such big machines. You know what I mean? And, I guess I sort of had an idea that it might be like this, but not really. Even the projections for how the film would do, how it would be received, it has all been blown out of the water. So I feel like I’m just kind of floating along on this cloud and it feels pretty wild.”
When I asked her why she felt like the Spider-Verse movies were so poignant to audiences, she talked a lot about Rio’s place in the franchise. “I think it’s all pretty organic,” she said. “They introduced her in the first one and we got a sense of how she operates. But it’s part of the work we do. It’s in there, it gets baked in the beginning when you’re creating the character. So she just continues to breathe in the second one. But I love that they gave her this opportunity to just let us know how she feels about her son, about her son going from being a little man, you know, her little man into a young man and all that stuff. She sees him with a girl and her sensing that there’s something else going on with him, intuiting, that there’s a bigger secret.”
You can see our full conversation here:
Luna Lauren Vélez is in both Across the Universe and Rise of the Beasts and she shines in both!
(featured image: Sony Pictures Releasing)
