She writes her own lines, drives her own trucks, and refuses to play it safe — no wonder the Andor star is also a favorite on planet fashion
Words by RICHARD GODWIN
Photography by JACK WATERLOT
Styling by PETRA FLANNERY STUDIO
Should you encounter a bright orange 1970s Ford F-150 pickup truck driving through your neighborhood making an unseemly noise, don’t be surprised if Adria Arjona is at the wheel. The Puerto Rico–born actor, 33, is “obsessed” with trucks, she tells me, swiping through pictures of pickups on her phone. She has a small collection, including a vintage Chevy and an everyday Tacoma, as well as the F-150 — but not a Cybertruck, she stresses, because it’s not a pickup truck. “I hate it,” she says. “I don’t like any car that’s not a pickup truck.”
“No one expects me to come out of a truck in a dress and heels.”
Arjona is one of the hottest female talents in Hollywood after a stellar 2024 that included Richard Linklater’s romantic thriller Hit Man and Zoë Kravitz’s feminist comedy-horror movie Blink Twice. This year she returns in Season 2 of Andor, the Star Wars spinoff that everyone agrees is the best thing to happen in that universe in eons. She has also secured modeling contracts with Giorgio Armani and Tiffany and stepped onto the red carpet with her equally in-demand romantic partner, Jason Momoa. In short, Arjona is in one of those heady spells: Everyone is asking her to do everything all at once, which might explain her attachment to solid, dependable vehicles that can stand the test of time.
“I just feel really powerful when I drive it,” she says. “I like people’s faces when I get out of the car. No one expects me to come out of that thing in a dress and heels. And I like driving it through Beverly Hills with that engine roaring. I like opposites. It makes me giggle.”
We are talking over fresh mint tea at the Corinthia Hotel in London on a beautiful spring afternoon. Arjona is in the U.K. to promote Andor, and she has already prompted a minor flash mob outside the hotel as a group of fans recognize her and swarm her for autographs. “I try to do as much as I possibly can. But I’m human, and I have good days and bad days,” she says. She has a definite presence, even dressed down in a baggy black sweater and a Jeanne Moreau–esque cloth cap that perches just so over her dark curly hair. “I keep looking at your companion,” a New Zealander at a neighboring table says when Arjona gets up. “I keep wondering how her hat stays on her head.”
There’s that. And she’s also incredibly beautiful and funny. Her line “Who the fuck is Gary?” from Hit Man has been turned into a thousand memes. It occurs as Glen Powell’s character, whom Arjona’s character had assumed was a brave, charismatic hit man called Ron, reveals himself to be an undercover police contractor named Gary. She improvised it in rehearsals: “I’m like, ‘Gary? I’m Puerto Rican. I’ve never heard of anyone called Gary. Who the fuck is Gary?’ Rick [Linklater] started dying laughing and said, ‘Write that down.’ ”
Behind that excellent timing, however, is a steeliness that’s very much to the fore in Andor. Here she plays Bix, a mechanic from a salvaging outpost called Ferrix who is the sort of person who’d drive a Star Wars version of an F-150 pickup. “She’s a ferocious Ferrixian,” Arjona says. “She’s working class. She believes in hard work, family, and loyalty, so when she’s betrayed, it really destroys her.” For most of the first season, she was pretty up against it. “The cool thing about Season 2 is we get to find out how she responds,” she continues. “Is she going to get better? Or worse?” Or … evil? “I’m telling you nothing,” she says. “You have to watch the show.”
She does say that the series was a significant acting challenge. The action jumps forward across 12 episodes, a prequel to the 2016 film Rogue One (which itself was an origin story to the critical mission at the climax of George Lucas’s first Star Wars film, in 1977). “It’s easier to jump five years than one year. In five years there are major differences. But how different are you from a year ago? It’s so subtle you can’t pinpoint it. It was pretty fucking hard. Every actor in the season will say the same thing.”
It’s fair to say that Disney has had its share of misses since it bought the Star Wars franchise for $4 billion in 2012. But Andor stands out as a critical and commercial success, much like Rogue One. It has been praised for its overall intelligence (the showrunner is Tony Gilroy of Bourne Identity; the scripts are by Beau Willimon, creator of House of Cards) as much as its technical accomplishments. “They built an entire city,” Arjona says of the enormous soundstage at Pinewood Studios near London, where the series was shot. “You could get lost in it. I could run in any direction and everything was filmable. And then there are these huge set pieces I can’t wait for everyone to watch.”
The actors in these massive franchises often come across as alienated from the process, aware they are tiny cogs in a huge machine. Arjona, on the other hand, seems to love every minute. “It was one of my goals: I must be in Star Wars. I need to be in Star Wars. It’s important for a Latin American woman to be in Star Wars,” she says. “So to hold that representation as a fan of the franchise is really exciting.”
Her involvement was even sweeter because she had narrowly missed out on being cast for an earlier project in the franchise (she can’t say which). “I walked away thinking it really went my way. You can sense those things a bit. And I left and within four days I was told it wasn’t going my way. And it destroyed me. It shattered me. I went skydiving the next day and I said, ‘I’m leaving all this on the plane.’ ” Hang on, the parachute? “No! I mean I left all that anxiety and desire on the plane,” she says.
As a result, she arrived in London for her Andor audition in 2022 primed for disappointment. “I was the only one there,” she says. “I did one scene and Tony Gilroy said, ‘Good job. Let’s go to the other scene.’ I did the other scene once too. It’s usually a bad sign when you do a scene only once, so I’m thinking I really screwed it up. And Tony looks at me and says, ‘Welcome to Star Wars, kid.’ ”
Needless to say, it was exciting news. In fact, Arjona says, it was the moment that everything she’d been working toward came together. “Within 10 minutes, Tony Gilroy changed the trajectory of my life. I don’t think anyone has done that for me,” she says. “It usually takes days — weeks — to hear about an audition. They make you wait. And while you wait, you doubt. You think, ‘I should quit acting. I don’t deserve this.’ But it instills so much confidence in you as an actor when someone has zero doubts about you.”
She is particularly proud that her costar in the title role is the Mexican actor Diego Luna. “There are two Latin leads in Andor, one of the most important Star Wars shows yet. That makes me hopeful,” Arjona says. “We haven’t had that opportunity to play in those roles before. I’ve never watched Star Wars and seen me. That’s why it’s important. I want little girls and teenagers like me to see themselves on screen.”
“I have a very different definition of home. If my partner is with me in London, I’m home.”
At this point I wonder how hopeful anyone can be about these things given the wider American political context. But as soon as I mention Donald Trump, she says, “I do not want to go there. It is way too depressing. Ask me something interesting.”
We move on instead to her childhood. Her father, Ricardo Arjona, is a Guatemalan singer-songwriter who is a big deal in the Latin world; his eight million monthly Spotify streams are in the region of Paul Simon or Neil Young. “He’s a big deal at home too,” Arjona says. “Like, in our household. He’s just a very cool and funny guy. He’s so silly and goofy and us kids — all we want to do is be with dad. He’s just a pretty cool dude. He can be a total asshole too. But mostly he’s a pretty cool dude and I like hanging out with him.”
Adria, her brother (also Ricardo), and their Puerto Rican mother, Leslie Torres, spent much of their time on the road while their father toured Central and South America. “We moved from place to place. Our base was Mexico City, but we’d venture out when my dad was on tour. There’s a big joke in my family. We’d say, ‘Wait. Did we go to school?’ My dad would say, ‘I think you did’ and my mum would say, ‘You definitely did.’ But I don’t have that many memories of school. All my memories are from tour.”
Arjona’s first love was dancing — she still takes lessons when she has a spare moment — but she resisted her father’s attempts to shape her into a musician. Her love of acting emerged through play. “I was falling in love with characters and mimicking them. I would play pretend on my own a lot and I thought I was crazy,” she says. “My dad was like, ‘Well, you’ve always been creative. Why don’t you try acting?’ ”
She first moved to the U.S. when she was 16, enrolling at the Miami Actors Studio. “Once I started, I was fascinated,” she says. “It was like a bug that went in my brain, and I could not let it out.” She went on to study at the prestigious Lee Strasberg Theatre & Film Institute in New York (alma mater of Scarlett Johansson, Claire Danes, and Lady Gaga). Then she moved to Los Angeles, where the roles started picking up. Before Andor, she had won a lead role as Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz spinoff Emerald City (2017) and the remake of Father of the Bride (2022). When I ask which actors she looks up to, she cites Salma Hayek and Gena Rowlands, but towering above them is Penélope Cruz. “She’s such a role model for me,” Arjona says. “She’s so effortless and genuine in every single one of her performances. She elevates anything.”
It’s fair to say that the two 2024 releases put Arjona in a different league. Hit Man is a delight — the kind of intelligent, mid-budget, character-driven movie that everyone complains that no one makes anymore in the streaming age. One of its chief delights is the chemistry between Arjona and Powell. “Oh, man,” she says when I mention it. “We’re really good friends. I love him dearly. He’s a really beautiful person.”
They had never met until Linklater threw them together. A 45-minute meeting turned into a five-hour dinner. Dry January resolutions turned into tequilas. “So Rick was like, ‘All right, we’re doing this.’ They don’t make them like that anymore. They are two gentlemen,” she says. “I loved every second of making that movie. We had so much fun.” Arjona ended up writing much of her character Madison’s dialogue, which gave her additional confidence. “It’s one of those movies where I’d just love to go back and soak it all in a little more,” she says. “I wish we could do another one.”
“It was one of my goals. It’s important for a Latin American woman to be in ‘Star Wars.’ ”
Trying to align schedules with her similarly on-fire costar might be difficult, I suggest. “True,” she says, laughing. “It’s so exciting to see your friends succeed at the level that you saw them at. I met Glen and I saw him up here. And the world hadn’t seen him that high up. And it just warms my heart now that they’re catching up.”
He might say the same about her. It’s also a challenge to find time with her partner, Jason Momoa, who is having his own moment thanks to the enormous success of A Minecraft Movie. “Yeah, but we find it — we always find it,” Arjona says. She is not inclined to say much more about their relationship (Momoa’s former long-term partner was Lisa Bonet, the mother of Kravitz, Arjona’s director on Blink Twice), but she is effusive about the Minecraft movie. “I’ve watched it five times. I love it. It’s the best movie this year. It’s killing it. I went to set a bunch. They deserve it all. They put so much love and heart into this movie; they know how much it means to kids. It has destroyed at the box office. It makes me smile.”
Pénelope Cruz is a role model, so effortless and genuine in every performance.
Her time is a lot more precious now. Is she more protective over it? “It’s harder to say yes to things,” Arjona says. “I believe you only have so many phases as an actor. If you do have a moment, people then want you to do that exact same thing again, right? And I don’t. I just did it. I want to do something else.” Her father’s advice is to follow her gut. “That’s what I always stay true to. I have said no to some wild stuff this year, and people think I’m insane. But my gut is saying no.”
She has two more projects due this year that seem set to cement her status. There is the comedy Splitsville, costarring Dakota Johnson and Nicholas Braun (that’s Greg from Succession, folks). “I had so much fun making it. We just found out it’s going to Cannes,” Arjona says. Then there is the movie Onslaught, directed by Adam Wingard. “It’s this cool piece of art that we did. I’m being pretty picky. You only have so many movies you can make in a lifetime, and I want to do work I can be proud of,” she says. In the future, she has her sights on a period drama. “I don’t really think we get to play around in that space a lot. I would love to be in a western. I would love to bring more Latin American stories to life.”
For now, Arjona is absolutely delighted to be working, working, working‚ living from airport to hotel to set to car. “I grew up on the road, so I have a very different definition of home from a lot of people. I honestly find home in people. If my partner is with me in London, I’m home. If my mom or my friends are with me, I’m home. It really depends on where my people are.”
Her stuff, she clarifies, is in L.A. And part of her heart is too. “California changed my life. The second I came to L.A., everything started flourishing. I owe a lot to L.A.,” Arjona says. “You have everything in California — the ocean, the desert. That’s one of the reasons I moved there. I’ll always have roots in California. That’ll never change. But I love being a road body. I don’t know any different.”
Styling by MARCO MILANI for Petra Flannery Studio.
Hair by AMANDA LEE at Highlight Artists.
Makeup by EMILY CHENG at The Wall Group.
Manicure by GINGER LOPEZ at Opus Beauty.
Shot on location at ANNENBERG COMMUNITY BEACH HOUSE.
Feature image: MIU MIU bikini and skirt, prices upon request. TIFFANY & CO. earrings, $7,500, and bracelet, $11,000.
This story originally appeared in the Summer 2025 issue of C Magazine.
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