WARNING: There are SPOILERS ahead for Roma.
Please only read on if you’ve seen Alfonso Cuaron’s deeply personal, poetic and beautiful drama, which is now available to stream on Netflix.
Yalitza Aparicio’s ascent from acting novice to leading actress in Alfonso Cuaron’s critically acclaimed Roma was so meteoric that she can be forgiven for making some oversights along the way.
Yalitza Aparicio talks Roma
However, there was one little lie that Aparicio told to the producers of Roma that actually put her in danger. That’s because the actress insisted that she could swim, even though she couldn’t. Which became quite a big issue when she had to shoot a scene where she saved two children from the ocean.
“Actually I was quite scared to shoot that scene,” Aparicio tells Metro. “Because the producers had asked me if I knew how to swim and I had said yes. But that wasn’t true. I never imagined that this scene would take place in an ocean. That was quite scary for me.”
But when it came to shooting the sequence Aparicio miraculously managed to overcome these issues.
“The way I overcame that fear was that once the cameras started rolling I sort of imagined that I had embraced my character to such an extent that I imagined these were my kids, who I took care of in a very motherly way, and that they were drowning and that I would do exactly what any mother would do and save the children. At that point I went with that.”
Roma has been widely praised by critics, so much so that it has a score of 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, while it is widely believed to be one of the front-runners for the 2019 Academy Awards.
You can judge the film for yourself now, as Roma has just been released on Netflix.
