With ‘Upgraded,’ Camila Mendes Is Here to Prove She’s Grown Up Since ‘Riverdale’: I ‘Just Want to Be Taken Seriously’
09.02.2024 - 22:13
/ variety.com
Emily Longeretta For most of her career, Camila Mendes has been known as Veronica Lodge. She portrayed the rich, confident high schooler on The CW’s “Riverdale” for six years, appearing in 136 of the 137 episodes before the series wrapped up last year. And now, she’s ready to put that behind her in order to show the world what else she can do.
“I’m sure I will be typecast — I think people are gonna offer me roles based off things that they’ve already seen me do. So it only’s natural that’s what would happen,” she tells Variety. Which is part of the reason Mendes is attracted to projects she can also produce, and she’s both the star and an executive producer of “Upgraded,” a new romantic comedy that dropped on Amazon Prime Video’s on Feb.
9. In it, Mendes plays Ana, a young art intern who meets a handsome stranger (Archie Renaux) and lies to him about her job when she’s on a last-minute work trip to London. Mendes is also an executive producer on her next project, “Musica,” set to debut at SXSW.
“I feel like it’s a way for me to take agency over my career and force people to see me do things they haven’t seen me do before — whether they like it or not,” she says. Here, she talks to Variety about her role as Ana in “Upgraded,” the power of rom-coms — and why she’s taking a break from them — and what she learned from working on “Riverdale” for so long. When you first read “Upgraded,” how did you find your way into the character of Ana? I really fell in love with the story, I thought it was unique.
I’d never seen a rom-com set in the art world before. It felt like a version of “Devil Wears Prada,” but in the art auction house world, so that was really appealing to me. But for me, it was really important that I came on as an
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