Many viewers watching Adria Arjona in Hit Man, the sawtoothed Richard Linklater–directed comedy that hit theaters last spring, likely asked themselves the same question: Who is she? As Madison, a newly liberated and increasingly unhinged divorcée looking to create a new life away from her scummy ex-husband, Arjona is indelible.
In fact, you’ve probably seen Arjona before. She’s been working in Hollywood for over a decade. “Maybe if I’d done things differently, I’d be a huge movie star already,” she says when I ask her about the vixen persona she leans into in Hit Man— the kind of role so often associated with Latina actors. “But from the beginning, I told myself I wouldn’t stick to one genre or type of character.”
From supporting roles on TV series like Andor, Narcos, and True Detective to stints in action movies (6 Underground, Morbius) and rom-coms (including the 2022 remake of Father of the Bride), Arjona has made a point to mix it up—“Not just because I didn’t want to be pigeonholed, but because I’m an artist,” she says. “I don’t want to get bored.”
These days, Arjona is far from bored. Hit Man is just one in a streak of breakout roles for the 32-year-old actor. The summer blockbuster Blink Twice, Zoë Kravitz’s hotly anticipated directorial debut, saw her embark on a dodgy island retreat alongside a stacked cast that includes Channing Tatum and Alia Shawkat. Los Frikis, in which Arjona plays a member of a punk collective in 1990s Cuba, premiered at the Miami Film Festival in April. Soon, she’ll be shooting movies by acclaimed Latino directors Jayro Bustamante and Gerardo Naranjo. Both projects are leading roles.
Arjona answers my call from the car, and speaks to me on an elevator as she ascends to the set of her current gig. It’s been a week since she landed in Portland, Oregon, where she’s shooting a season of the Amazon Prime series Criminal opposite Charlie Hunnam. Arjona bursts out laughing when I ask if she’s a native English speaker. “My team and I made T-shirts with the words ESL”—English as a second language—“on them during the Hit Man press tour,” the Puerto Rican-Guatemalan actor says.
Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Mexico and Miami, Arjona didn’t grow up wanting to be in show business—in part because her father, the grammy-winning Latin pop star Ricardo Arjona, often took her on tour, which opened her eyes to the chaos that can accompany the life of an entertainer. As a kid, she was painfully shy, so her father encouraged her to pursue an artistic outlet to loosen up.
At 18, Arjona moved to New York, where she graduated from the Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute, an acting program informed by Strasberg’s “method” techniques. While Arjona has never “gone method” or completely lost herself in a role, her courses taught her that identity is mutable, and that she has “multiple different psyches inside waiting to be unleashed.”
In those early years, Arjona also became obsessed with the films of John Cassavetes, whose wife and regular collaborator, Gena Rowlands, became the inspiration behind her fearless, physically expressive performance style. “She blew my mind. If I could do just 3 percent of what [Gena] did in each movie, that’d be enough,” Arjona says. Actors like Salma Hayek and Penélope Cruz also served as role models. “It’s different now, but when I was young there weren’t that many Spanish-speaking actresses working in Hollywood to look up to,” she says.
Still, Arjona doesn’t consider herself a quote-unquote Latina actor. “I am an actress who happens to be Latina, and my goal is to morph myself into whatever character I need to be. As a Latin woman, these questions of representation are complicated. I think there’s no right way to represent us,” she says. “There are many different kinds of Latinas. Even my mom, stepmom, and cousins—those are wildly different women! The rest of the world might look at [a Latina] and think, physically, she’s exotic. I don’t get that because I grew up in Latin America. There’s nothing exceptional about the way we look.”
In Hit Man, Arjona goes toe-to-toe with Glen Powell, who plays a fake hit man hired by the police to catch would-be killers. Throughout the film, Arjona’s Madison evolves from a hunched, twitchy woman desperate to find an escape to a bona fide gunslinger herself. She brings a playful, at turns cocky, sensuality to her role while also, somehow, making us aware that she’s performing as a seductress.
In working with Linklater, who encouraged Arjona to weigh in and shape her character’s arc, Arjona experienced an unprecedented degree of creative freedom. “The script originally didn’t have many sex scenes, but through rehearsals and our conversations, I decided role-play is Maddy’s love language,” she says. Arjona takes credit for inventing two of the film’s most titillating scenes: the first, a sequence at a nightclub that sees Maddy and Powell’s Gary dirty dancing like no one’s watching, and the second, a rendezvous in which Maddy dresses up as a naughty flight attendant. The details of each sex scene were fleshed out collaboratively—Powell and Arjona used shared Pinterest boards to compile images and artworks they found sensual and engaging.
For Arjona, something interesting happens when a gendered stereotype is wielded by a woman. “Madison isn’t really a bombshell—she leans into and uses it to her advantage,” she says, referring to her character’s decision to channel her sex drive, seize her chance at love, and ultimately change the conditions of her life. For her part, Arjona is hyperaware of her own vampy public image—something she has carefully curated online—as well as the misconceptions it breeds.
That doesn’t mean she’s bothered by the disconnect. “When people meet me, they’re always surprised that I’m kind of a tomboy, or like this excited, clumsy puppy,” she adds. “Probably because they’ve looked at my Instagram.”
All clothing and accessories by GIVENCHY
Creative Direction by Marcos Fecchino
Hair by Mara Roszak
Makeup by Cedric Jolivet
Nails by Caroline Cotten
Modeling by Shelton Taylor and Royce Lundquist
Photography Assistance by Ian Buosi
Styling Assistance by Frankie Benkovic
Lighting Direction by Khashi Tahamtan
