bat girl Star Leslie Grace had 10 months to agree that Warner Bros. would not release this film, and she insists that she really did.
“I moved on,” Grace told Yahoo Entertainment. “I’m working on a lot of exciting things that really align with the path that I’m looking forward to enjoying and building. And I’m so grateful to have had the experience of bat girl and meeting the people I met from that experience, and getting support that, in some cases, I didn’t even know was there after it was announced that it was not going to be published.”
She hasn’t even ruled out a role in James Gunn’s DC Extended Universe in the future, or playing a superhero anywhere, if offered.
“Yeah! I mean, why not? Why not?” Grace said. “Who knows what the future holds for us?”
For now, the singer and In the heights the star encourages the stars of the film blue beetlein theaters August 18, which features the DCEU’s first Latino superhero.
“I think it’s such a big win for our community to be able to see people representing us in a way that we haven’t been able to see in the past,” Grace said. “And, absolutely…if you’re Latino in the industry, you know there’s still a lot of work to be done, and there’s also so much space and room for nuanced representation of Latinos in film and television that we have yet to unpack.”
Grace speaks of her own heritage: her maternal grandmother came to the United States from the Dominican Republic in her thirties. She had to leave her three children behind for a few years as she established a family home in a new country, and to this day struggles with English.
Grace, 28, was born in New York. She remembers growing up watching her older siblings translate things, something as simple as an interaction at a grocery store, for the adults in her family.
“My mother ended up speaking English, and my other aunts and uncles,” she says. “But, with my grandmother, her ability and abilities, we noticed, would become so limited just because of the barrier of not being able to understand what someone might say to her or what might be in her mail, something really important at the doctor’s office.”
Because of her backstory, Grace really connected with Translators, the next short film she is promoting, although she is not part of the cast or crew. That’s how much she believes in Emmy-winning director Rudy Valdez’s story about the more than 11 million child translators in the United States, helping older family members navigate their lives. daily. They translate their teacher’s comments about them to their parents at a school lecture, help them understand crucial doctor’s instructions, or even get a US license.
Grace feels so strongly, because it’s also her family’s story.
“I and some of my younger family members have done this for the older generations of my family,” Grace said. “And so once I saw the doc, I just wanted to get involved and lend my voice to amplify the stories of the three families in that doc.”
The singer/actress, who starred in and produced this year’s podcast How to make friends and make people disappear and co-stars in the upcoming crime movie The thicketalongside Juliette Lewis and Peter Dinklage, will even attend the premiere of Translators on June 13 at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York.
“I’m thrilled…to be able to be part of the conversation that I think will be shocking to some people,” Grace says, “to learn that a third of Hispanics are not fluent in English and that their children are their primary translators and shoulder that burden, so we hope we can find more effective ways to meet the needs of these families who deserve to be accessible just as much as anyone else.
Translators is available to stream starting Wednesday, June 14 on TranslatorsFilm.com.