One of the most staggering things about In the Heights? It’s Leslie Grace’s feature debut. Given all of her accomplishments in the music sphere, one might expect her to nail the song and dance numbers, but she also brings a level of nuance and heart to her performance that feels like a skill learned via a great deal of experience.
Grace plays Nina, a Washington Heights resident who’s returning home after her first year at Stanford University. The whole neighborhood is extremely proud of her and has sky high hopes for everything she’s bound to achieve, but inside, Nina’s struggling and wants to drop out. The pressure Nina is under leaps off the screen courtesy of Grace’s performance and her ability to give the viewer access to the push and pull of Nina’s situation. The motivation is there, but is it enough to overcome the pressure of what it means to be someone who “made it out?”
Yes, In the Heights marks Grace’s very first feature film, but she’s no stranger to auditioning for movies and Grace also found some crossover between her music and her acting that likely played a big part in fueling such an emotional performance. Here’s how she described it on Collider Ladies Night:
“I went into doing this movie obviously feeling imposter syndrome like, ‘I’ve never done this before! I hope that I don’t make a stupid mistake while everyone is watching.’ But everyone was so generous and told me so many stories of first times and they just really made me feel welcome. And it allowed me to learn how many similarities there are between singing and acting, and one of them is being able to feel the pace of a moment. Knowing what the moment requires, if it requires a soft touch or if it requires more of a pressing into a moment. That feeling of what’s happening in a scene or the feeling of what’s happening in the other characters’ world and being a generous actor, it’s the same [when] you’re in a duet being a generous feature artist or being a generous performer and knowing how to interpret a moment, knowing how to interpret a feeling. It’s the same space. It’s knowing what’s necessary for the performance and certain emotion.”
Another component that likely contributed to Grace’s show-stopping work in In the Heights? The fact that she identified with Nina. While discussing the In the Heights audition process, Grace revealed that there was a point when she read for both Nina and Vanessa - as did Melissa Barrera - but ultimately, they both landed in the roles that spoke to their own experiences most.
“So I definitely felt [like I] most identified with Nina and was going for Nina and I had read originally for Nina. And then I remember, a year and a half later, that second time around once I read in front of Jon [M. Chu] again and Lin [Manuel Miranda] and Quiara [Alegría Hudes], they had asked that I learn the part of Vanessa, and the same for Mel. She was there for Nina or Vanessa. That last audition in front of Lin, we read and chemistry read both parts on that day, and we switched around a bunch of times, for a little bit, for a couple of hours. I was ready. I just wanted to be a part of this thing. But it turned out that all of us really ended up playing the people that we really knew and that we truly didn’t really have to act. I really identity myself with Nina and the struggles of her being a first generation Latina Americana that’s trying to push forward but also feels fragmented in her indentity a little bit. And I know that Mel feels really reflected in the role of Vanessa, feeling like, ‘I’ve gotta make it out and get to my dream,’ and falling back in love with her hometown, finding the beauty of everything that she is because of where she came from.”
Adding yet another vital tool to Grace’s acting toolkit, so to speak, let’s look at a pivotal note she received from director Jon M. Chu that completely changed the game for one of Nina’s most emotional beats in the movie. Grace explained:
“In the dinner scene, which was a very hard scene for all of us, but for me, where Nina’s going back and forth with her dad. She has to express what she’s gone through at Stanford and that she was searched, and it’s a very vulnerable moment for her because she’s basically been hiding the reason why she doesn’t want to go back. And this is her moment to share, ‘Hey! This is what’s really freakin’ going on when I got to Stanford. This is how I get treated. This is [what] people that look like us get treated like, even though you guys think I’m a genius and fit right in.’ It takes time sometimes to get to the vulnerable place where you’re not pushing the emotion, but you’re also allowing everybody else to feel it and giving it the importance that something like that feels like, and so I remember Jon coming in to the very small space that we were all burning up in in that apartment, he came in to the dinner table and he whispered something in my ear, I won’t say particularly what it was, but he just gave me an ‘as if.’ ‘Say this as if it was this,’ and it changed my entire approach to the scene and to the point where I could barely verbalize the lines, but it was exactly what Nina needed to feel and needed to express in that dinner scene.”
Looking for even more about Grace’s journey from music sensation to big screen star? We’ve got it for you in her episode of Collider Ladies Night at the top of this article or in the uncut version of the conversation in podcast form below. Grace discussed taking improv classes with her sister, what Power Rangers star and collaborator Becky G said about Grace’s feature debut, the In the Heights crew member who made an especially big impression on her and loads more!