Karla Olivares Souza (born December 11, 1985) is a Mexican-American actress. She is known for her role as Laurel Castillo on the ABC legal drama series, How to Get Away with Murder.
Until they hired a Latina to write for Laurel [in How to Get Away with Murder], I was scared that she was going to fall into stereotypes.
I would get very frustrated reading scripts that were bilingual but maybe not bicultural.
Something I was adamant about was that the movie [Everybody Lovess Somebody] wouldn't end with, oh, marriage saved [the main character]. They're married and she's OK. I was very pushing on having the ending be that she made an inner growth of healing so that she can then have the ability and the space to love and be loved by someone else, and that love is open-ended and doesn't mean they're going to get married tomorrow and all her problems are solved.
In the movie [Everybody Loves Somebody], the sister tells my character, "No, don't you want to be with someone?" I think the family - especially in this movie - they know that the reason that Clara doesn't want to have an emotional, intimate relationship is more because she was hurt so badly from heartbreak that she's then being closed off and cynical.
I felt really strongly about this script [ Everybody Loves Somebody] because, like you said, it's a very specific way of life.
["When are you getting married" in Everybody Loves Somebody] is funny because it's put on by women and men. Society makes women feel like, oh, you're getting old.
When we see society telling women that they have a certain time, that they make women compete with each other, the older generation competing with the younger generation. They've made us believe that there's not enough men out there for us or that we're only hired because of our looks and not because of our abilities.
I think that, for sure, we as women should try and realize that it's more about having someone to share.
There's a lot of lies out there that we should catch and that have taken me a lot of time to sort of see, and reading up on it and getting educated on it. I'm reading a book that's about how images of beauty have hurt women along the decades. It's a very educating but infuriating thing to see, how we don't have equal opportunity because they're demanding so much more.
I should have asked for credit - but he has no idea how amazing it is that a character that was written as a boy can be equally written for a girl. It's like you said, just write a character as if it were a man, and then turn it and make it into a woman. It's like, we're human beings, after all.
I feel that the power that storytelling has to change people, to bring them together, to have that cathartic sort of experience, is something that definitely has helped my life be worthwhile and better.
[Producers] promised me they wouldn't do that sort of "defining nature of my character is that Laurel is Latina [in How to Get Away with Murder]. " It has nothing to do with that. She just happens to be a Latina.
I think Shonda Rhimes came to change television for women forever.
I think it's not an easy task because there's not enough Latino writers that are being given opportunities to write things - and I say this because I've been given a lot of bilingual movies in the past because of my career in Mexico, and they're like, "Oh, it's going to make sense for her to do this. " A lot of studios want to hit that demographic, but they sort of do it without starting in the right way, which is having someone who knows the culture, and enjoys the language as well, to be able to write these things.
I knew that [directorscreenwriter] Catalina Aguilar Mastretta had an amazing take on the female psyche and the modern woman and the modern immigrant woman living in the U. S. , and I really saw the need for a story told of our daily lives without being a statistic and without just trying to hit a demographic, and I felt that with this one.
There's a lot of things, even the landscape that we show in the movie [Everybody Loves Somebody] of Ensenada in Baja is just spectacular. There's so much more - I wish we could have shown more, but I'm glad we didn't see the typical, you know, border-sombrero-tequila thing that we normally do.
This movie [Everybody Loves Somebody] is as much for the general market as it is for Latino audiences. That's a really exciting prospect.
[Everybody Loves Somebody] was a different take on that immigrant sort of life.