Monterrey Mexico.- Her name is Lucy Paez, she is 14 years old, she is originally from San Pedro and her Hollywood debut is nothing less than Jennifer Lopez.
Last Friday, La Madre, the new action film by J.Lo, came to the Netflix menu, where the sampetrina plays Zoe, daughter of the protagonist.
For this story, directed by Niki Caro (Mulán) and in which Joseph Fiennes (Passionate Shakespeare), Omari Hardwick (Power) and the Mexican Gael García Bernal also act, the teenager learned the use of firearms, self-defense and coexistence with wolves.
The sampetrina was selected among 10 thousand girls who auditioned for the tape.
“I feel like it was too fast,” Lucy says excitedly. “I was almost one of the last to enter the audition, I made the ‘call back’, I came to Los Angeles and we went to film in Vancouver. There they began to prepare me with classes in handling weapons, with the wolves so that they would bite me the hand (a scene from the film) and self-defense”.
Just a few hours after the premiere in Los Angeles held on Thursday night, the young woman details in an interview the preparation for the film.
“Here they had me with a professional. They took me to a ‘shooting ranch’ and it was super ‘safe’. They had me with the man, telling me all the instructions to do it super well,” he says.
In the film, Jennifer’s character teaches her daughter to drive, but prior to filming it was different.
“Literally: a man came and told me ‘I’m going to teach you to drive’. I told all my friends that ‘I’m going to learn to drive, super cool, I’m going to be better than all’ to the car, he taught me how to start the car and that’s it”.
“I told Niki (the director) ‘I want people to think I’m driving.’ And yes, it looks like I’m driving.”
The Mother began filming in September 2021 and concluded in March 2022, with locations in Vancouver, Alaska, Cuba, and the Canary Islands.
Filming in the snow, in Canada, far from making Lucy uncomfortable, was something she enjoyed, although it was not the same for Jennifer.
“I love the cold. Something that I liked about this movie is that almost everything is real, the ‘wolfs’, the ‘snow’, everything was real. I feel that Jennifer was the one who had the most problems with the cold because sometimes she loves the heat. With the snow I felt like it was Christmas every day,” she says.
The beginning
Since she was a child, Lucy developed her taste for acting.
Together with her father, she was a regular at the cinema to see films of various genres, not just princess films.
“While all the girls were watching princess stories, I was watching action and scary movies. That made me fall in love with movies a lot,” says the eighth grade student.
She was 5 years old when an uncle who lives in Houston encouraged her to go to a theater casting and she was delighted.
“I think it was a Peter Pan play, something very small. I remember my mother was from: ‘No, she doesn’t even know how to read’ and yes, I didn’t even know, literally, I was a baby. But I begged her until I could go.
“My uncle took me to the theater and I fell in love from day one. I remember going out and saying, ‘Mom, I don’t want to dance anymore. I want to do this for the rest of my life. I want to be an actress.'”
In Mexico, he acted in the films Silencio, by director Lorena Villarreal, shot in Monterrey, and El Exorcismo de Carmen Farías, by director Rodrigo Fiallega, in both with small roles.
J.Lo makes her nervous
Although she considers herself a confident girl, the first time she met Jennifer, she was intimidated.
“Everybody was telling me, ‘You’re going to feel nervous because it’s Jennifer Lopez,’ but I feel like I handle meeting new people pretty well, but when I got to the audition and I saw it all produced and obviously, super ‘The Mother’, because that was the joke, I got nervous. She later told me ‘she was trying to intimidate you to see how you would react'”.
The hard and distant attitude that Lopez’s character shows on stage was only in front of the cameras because on the set Lucy met a very good, friendly and shared woman.
“She was a very beautiful person and being next to an icon, being next to her and seeing her work, I learned something new every day. Something that I have realized is that many people feel that they do not give her credit, it is that He’s too good a person,” he says.
And although she treasures every word that Jennifer said to her, what stands out most about her “movie mother” is her human quality and how hard-working she is.
“One day you would see him at the MTV Awards and the next day he was in Canada at 5 in the morning working in the mud, with the guns, moving. That impressed me like hell.
“He was a good person with everyone, he said ‘good morning’ to everyone. I remember that at the end of the shoot he gave the entire production backpacks from the Coach brand (of which J.Lo is the image)”.
After her debut in Hollywood, Lucy is determined to give continuity to her career, she has an agent in the United States and has already begun to read projects to continue acting.
“Obviously I love Mexico, but when I can come to Los Angeles, of course I would like to come, but I will always love Monterrey. Monterrey is in my heart.”
a star taking off
– Lucy Paez was selected by Netflix as one of its rising stars, for her portrayal of Zoe in The Mother.
– The royal was considered among the 23 outstanding new young figures.
