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Melissa Fumero and Stephanie Beatriz hope to make your life 'More Better' with their new podcast

Andrea Flores, Los Angeles Times on

Published in Entertainment News

“Is anyone else having a hard time doing this?” said Fumero with a chuckle, referring to adulthood. “When you have part of your life in the public arena, people think you have it all together. I really don’t though.”

“More Better,” Beatriz says, is a chance for listeners to get to know the duo beyond their on-camera work.

“There’s not a lot of space to be yourself as an actor,” Beatriz said. “We are looking forward to sharing our actual personalities [on the pod].”

The actors also admitted that the podcast gives them an excuse for the two to catch up like they would in their old “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” dressing rooms.

“I feel like I’m in a safe space to talk about stuff that’s really hard,” Beatriz said.

And though the podcast is backed by Valderrama’s Latino initiative, the two podsters make it clear what “More Better” isn’t about.

 

“Our Latinidad [is not] at the center of the pod,” Beatriz said. “Our podcast happens to be two Latinas and we talk about our experiences as human beings.”

The two have come a long way from once believing that Fox, the network that first aired “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” before it was picked up by NBC, would fire one of them during the first season of filming because there couldn’t possibly be two Latinas in the same show. This fear led them to wear distinct hairstyles despite both having naturally curly hair.

Instead of one of them being fired, “Brooklyn Nine-Nine” creators Mike Schur and Dan Goor embraced the duo for their individual personalities. The sitcom even explored the complexities of being a queer Latine, an identity both Beatriz and her character Rosa Diaz share.

“[Schur and Gore] didn’t worry about writing to our culture or ethnicity,” said Fumero. “They wrote to the honesty of our characters.”

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