For two decades Nadine Velazquez has been handed the part the plot needs rather than the part the writer loves: the maid, the lawyer, the wife. She plays them without fuss, and the interesting work is her steady effort to be given something else.
Fi1m perspective
The last ten minutes of a Major Crimes episode are a negotiation: a suspect, a lawyer, a deal, and a deputy district attorney who will have to stand up in court and defend it. That is Nadine Velazquez's job on the programme, as Emma Rios, and it tells you most of what her career has been. She is the person the plot needs in the scene. Somebody has to make twenty-five years sound like a kindness, and the writers gave that work to her.
It was much the same in My Name Is Earl (2005), where she spent the first series as Catalina, the motel maid, mostly standing at the edge of the frame while Jason Lee, Ethan Suplee and Jaime Pressly did the talking. The writers found more for her to do as the series went on, and we noticed, somewhere in the later years, that we had started waiting for her lines. That is not nothing for a character who had been furniture for a whole series. She stayed for all ninety-six episodes, having turned down a part in Prison Break to take it, and the sitcom is still the thing most people will know her from.
The years since have been a deliberate walk away from that sort of part. Sofia in The League (2009), a comedy that let its cast improvise, kept the timing in use. Flight (2012), with Denzel Washington, was the first proper dramatic film role, and the reviews were not kind to the part: a romance for the hero to have, they said, and not much more. Snitch (2013) followed, then Major Crimes from its second series, where she was reunited with Raymond Cruz, who had been Paco in Earl and was now Julio Sanchez. Then Six (2017), as the wife of a Navy SEAL, a part she prepared for by talking to military wives, and Queens (2021), which asked her to rap, which nothing in the previous sixteen years had.
What she brings is timing and a refusal to decorate. What has not always worked is the parts themselves, which have too often been built for somebody else's story. She knows it. In 2017 she said she had wanted to stop being "the attractive stripper or the attractive wife or crazy wife", and the roles since have been chosen with that in mind. The honest verdict on the two series we have reviewed is that she is good in both and essential to neither, and that this is the writers' doing more than hers.
She has started producing and developing her own material, including a series drawn from her own life. If the parts will not come to her, she has evidently decided to write them. On the evidence of Earl and Major Crimes we would rather watch her defend a deal than stand at the edge of a sitcom frame, and we suspect she would too.
