In Boots Riley’s new movie I Love Boosters, Eiza González plays a cashier who moonlights as an expert in dialectical materialism. She dresses like a goth, hits her vape constantly and deep-dives on Reddit. But for González, the most radical thing about the role was acting alongside a group of women for the first time. “It’s always, like, five men and then me,” she says of her career. “I’ve always wondered why I get cast in things like that.”
But González, 36, is working on a theory. She’s found that the business tends to give women two windows: “The first is, ‘We don’t really know who you are’; and then they’re like, ‘This is all you are.’ ”
During her first window, she was a child star. González grew up in Mexico City and got her start at 16 in the children’s telenovela Lola, érase una vez before starring in Nickelodeon’s teen sitcom Sueña conmigo. She moved to Los Angeles in 2013 and toiled through auditions until she finally met casting legend Francine Maisler, who was looking for an actress to play opposite Jon Hamm in Edgar Wright’s Baby Driver. “I was competing against a lot of big names. But she fought for me and was like, ‘There’s this random girl out of nowhere from Mexico that I think you should hire.’ “
