‘Twisted Metal’ Star Stephanie Beatriz Says Quiet’s Lack of Dialogue in Series Premiere Was ‘Freeing’

Note: This interview was conducted prior to the SAG-AFTRA strike and includes spoilers for Episode 1

For actress Stephanie Beatriz, originating a new character for Peacock’s live-action adaptation of the PlayStation video game “Twisted Metal” — one who doesn’t utter a word in the series premiere — presented a unique and irresistible challenge.

“I love original storytelling,” she told TheWrap. “I think that’s what drew me to these scripts because my character is not even in the games. It’s a fully new character, fully new backstory, fully new world.

“The world opens up more and more every episode,” she added. “It’s in a way limitless.”

Beatriz plays Quiet, a badass axe-wielding car thief that acts purely on instinct. She comes from a community that oppressed her into silence and goes on to form an unlikely, antagonistic bond with John Doe (Anthony Mackie) as she becomes clouded by her need for revenge.

“I think that there’s like a really goofy, sweet love story in the middle of it. These two characters that are very antagonistic to each other and can’t stand each other most of the time, sort of grow to really care for each other,” she explained. “There’s chemistry there in lots of different ways, and Anthony and I were able to pull from all the different relationships that we’ve had. But ultimately, the relationship between the two of them is really funny and there’s a lot of push-pull and I think that that’s going to be surprising.”

She emphasized that the only guidelines she had to stick to were the words in the script.

“I mined that script for everything it was worth. But I didn’t have the external pressure of ‘you have to hit these marks’ and ‘you have to make it X, Y and Z,’ because this is how it was done before or drawn before or animated before,” Beatriz said. “And that was truly a gift because I felt really comfortable bringing parts of myself and my abilities that I’ve never brought to anything before.”

“I’ve done some action before in ‘Brooklyn Nine-Nine,’ I’ve done silly, zany comedy and stuff, particularly in the animated stuff that I’ve done like ‘Encanto’ or in musical theater stuff like ‘In the Heights,’ she added. “But the mix of all those things together in one character to make it like badass but also zany, but also very vulnerable in parts, I’d never put all of those parts of my ability together before in one character. So I’m excited to see how it supports the storytelling of the season.”

While the lack of dialogue at the beginning of the season was an “interesting challenge” for Beatriz, she found it “completely freeing as an actor to just be present and react to what’s happening around you.”

“Your brain isn’t like frantically going, ‘Oh s–t, what’s my next line? Your brain is absolutely, utterly focused on what’s happening in front of you, with the other actor and it’s so freeing. And to me, it was a huge gift to be given back at the beginning of the season because it set the tone for what I wanted to do for the rest of the season,” she said.

“Subsequently, I made sure to memorize the f–k out of my lines so that I wasn’t like, ‘What’s my next line?’ And that took a lot of energy. It was like memorizing for two hours every night when I had to get home, and then coming back on set and being ready. But it was just a structure that I had never experienced before… I loved it.”

While Beatriz is excited for audiences to see “Twisted Metal,” she expressed sadness that her father will never get to see it.

“My dad actually passed away the last week of filming and I wish he could have gotten to see it. I don’t think he really understood the whole scope of the thing that we were doing, but he was really, really excited about it,” she said. “I didn’t have a PlayStation in my house, that was for rich kids. But he was so proud of me that I was doing something this big, that this many people had a personal attachment to.”

She hopes audiences that come across the show will “get a kick out of it and really have a good time watching TV.”

“[TV] was one of the things that my dad and I connected over, especially comedy. We would sit and stare in the same direction at the TV but have these great conversations that were not conversations that you can normally have as a teenage girl staring into your dad’s eyes, but you can have them when you’re staring in the direction of the TV,” she said. “So honestly, for me, I just want the show to come out and for people to see it and see what we did.”

All episodes of “Twisted Metal” is now stream now on Peacock.

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