One of the great breakout hits of 2020, HBO Max’s comedy-drama-thriller The Flight Attendant follows a, well, flight attendant who wakes up in a hotel room next to a dead man and then scrambles to find the real killer. Witty, fast-paced, legitimately suspenseful, and just funny enough, The Flight Attendant not only made everyone who watched it see its lead, Kaley Cuoco, as a highly versatile actor whose talents stretch far beyond her work on The Big Bang Theory, but it also renewed appreciation for the phenomenal Rosie Perez.
In the series, Perez plays Megan Briscoe, a friend of Cassie Bowden (Cuoco) and in season one, Cassie’s fellow flight attendant on Imperial Atlantic Airlines. Cassie’s having a tough time when we first meet her: drinking too much, dropping the ball at work, and then becoming even more of a frazzled mess as she works to solve a murder mystery, mostly in secret. While Megan — infused with a lot of the tell-it-like-it-is Brooklyn-girl swagger Rosie Perez herself is beloved for — holds Cassie to task for her messy behavior, Megan has secrets of her own. Feeling bored and underappreciated by her spouse and kid, Megan got wrapped up in a scheme to sell corporate secrets from her husband’s job to some shady characters; by the time season concludes, Megan learns she’s been trading classified government secrets to North Korea and has to go on the run.
“It’s insane,” Perez tells Shondaland via Zoom in early April. “She’s gone from being in hot water to boiling water. It’s crazy, and I love it.” Perez is hardly alone in loving Megan’s misfortunate; the part earned Perez her first-ever Emmy nomination for acting in 2021, an outstanding supporting actress nomination, after already garnering nominations for choreography on the groundbreaking sketch show In Living Color in the ’90s and for outstanding talk-show host for her short-lived stint on The View in 2015. “I admire the fact that Megan is a full-bodied character, and a character who is extremely flawed in the most adorable and cringe-worthy way.”
Perez, adored by younger generations who discovered her dancing on Soul Train and revered for roles in iconic films White Men Can’t Jump and Do the Right Thing, may very well be one of the most enduring and yet underused talents in Hollywood. Many would call her an icon, but one reason Perez is not quite as ubiquitous as her longtime fans might hope is the scarcity of roles like Megan on The Flight Attendant. Still energetic and youthful at 57, Perez nonetheless came into Hollywood long before movements to advance opportunities for women and people of color became mainstream. It’s still a rarity, she says, to get the kind autonomy and encouragement to collaborate with producers and writers that she’s received on The Flight Attendant, when producers oftentimes just want actors (especially women) to just do as they’re told. Case in point: When Megan was first presented to her, Megan’s motivations weren’t entirely clear, and Perez came up with a solution.
“I was trying to rationalize why [Megan] would envy the life of a hot-mess alcoholic 30-something-year-old, being a middle-aged woman with a husband and a son and a nice house,” Perez says. “I told the executive producers, ‘She’s menopausal. She’s having a midlife crisis.’ And they said go with it.”
That choice (which, by the way, is never articulated but simply quietly informs Perez’s on-screen actions) allowed Perez to bring honesty to the character as well as make Megan resonate with men and women of a certain age. Bigger than that, it affirmed Perez’s instincts as a performer with more than 30 years of experience. “I had to learn how to fight correctly,” she says. “Because when you’re not a person of color and you say, ‘I don’t like this,’ they go, ‘Okay, well, what can we do?’ As a person of color, they go, ‘Well, this is how we want it.’ When I was younger, I would get very angry. As I got older, I learned how to be diplomatic about it and get what I want. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. On The Flight Attendant, it worked because the executive producers are all wonderful. They were giving and so open. And they weren’t racist. They didn’t treat me in a manner like I was early on in my career.”
This go-round, Megan and Cassie share a common desire to undo some of the damage they’ve done. Cassie, in recovery, has a new job and a new boyfriend who’ll support her in getting her life back on track (in theory, anyway), while Megan works to untangle the binds she got herself in. For Perez, it’s another chance to explore how a woman on the edge of self-destruction saves herself. “What I love about season two is, okay, you had your midlife crisis. Now what? What are you going to do? A lot of people would fall by the wayside and just accept [their fate]. Megan will not.”
As the season unfolds, viewers will see Megan make a way and defy the odds against her, just like Perez herself. Fasten your seat belts — this plane is about to take off.
The Flight Attendant season two premieres Thursday, April 21 on HBO Max.
Malcolm Venable is a Senior Staff Writer at Shondaland. Follow him on Twitter @malcolmvenable.
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