At an earlier point in her career, Justina Machado would have killed to be the lead.
“I’m never going to be the star … It’s never going to happen,” Machado recalls thinking when she landed a role in the 2016-21 USA Network TV series “Queen of the South.” “I’m just always going to be the actress you like on the show … I’m not going to lead one.”
Then came “One Day at a Time,” the Norman Lear-inspired comedy-drama created by Gloria Calderón Kellett, with Machado as its star. Now, she’s killing it as a murderous masseuse in Amazon Prime Video’s macabre series “The Horror of Dolores Roach” (all eight episodes now streaming), which reunites Machado with Kellett.
“It was a no-brainer that I wanted to be involved,” Machado says. “I loved how there were no boundaries. I loved how it was so out there. It was like nothing I’d ever done before.”
Based on Aaron Mark’s podcast and the solo play “Empanada Loca,” the “Sweeney Todd”-inspired dark comedy follows Roach, a woman who was imprisoned on marijuana charges for 16 years, navigating her old Washington Heights haunts in New York City who’s utterly lost due to the neighborhood’s gentrification.
With only $200 to her name, the only place Roach can find solace ― and a bed to sleep on ― is in the basement of Empanada Loca, owned by an old friend Luis (Alejandro Hernández). With Luis’ support, Roach opens a janky massage parlor below the empanada joint in an effort to start a new chapter.
That’s where “Magic Hands Dolores,” a nickname she earned by giving massages in prison in exchange for commissary goods, claims neck knots ― and lives.
Murders by massage aside, “there’s just something that you relate to about her. I don’t know what it is you relate to, and I don’t know what it is fulano or fulana (the average person) relates to,” but Roach rarely turns into a character you find yourself rooting against.
“And maybe that’s why she’s relatable, because ‘The Horror of Dolores Roach’ gets into the messiness of life.”
She’s a victim of an oppressive system and trying her best to survive. “People who have known people that come out of the system and have a hard time finding a job” may relate to her, Machado says. “If you know anything about jail, and I know a little bit from family members … if you don’t have anybody, you have nobody to send you money. You have nobody to come to visit you. You have nobody that you can call.”
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The effects of that trauma are played out in the show through Roach and Luis’ “complex” relationship, built on a foundation of weed, sex, empanadas and cannibalism. Even then, the two are each other’s ride or die.
“They both have suffered loss,” Machado says. “They both don’t have anybody else in the world. They’re both really, really lonely people that have this loving, toxic and crazy relationship.”
And unlike the drug dealer ex-boyfriend that ratted her out, Roach has “never had anybody as loyal as Luis.” He doesn’t question Machado after finding her first victim, a slumlord played by comedian Marc Maron. Instead, he whips up some empanadas.
The empanadas made of human flesh may be the central focus of “The Horror of Dolores Roach,” but the character’s Latino identity isn’t.
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“That’s what I love so much about this show that we are not hit over the head with (that), Machado says. “If I wasn’t Latina and Alejandro wasn’t Latino,” and they cast any other actor, “the story would still be Dolores Roach. It would still be about gentrification and post-incarceration.”
“Oh my god, you don’t even know,” Machado adds. “It’s so refreshing … after so many years in this business for my Latinidad to not be the reason and the deal.”
Machado has been in the game since the 90s, and at 50 years old she says, “It’s such an incredible thing to still be around. There was a moment when we aged out.”
During a time when actresses such as Jamie Lee Curtis, 64, Michelle Yeoh, 60, Angela Bassett, 64, and Sheryl Lee Ralph, 66, are getting their flowers, that’s not necessarily the case anymore.
“I’m really in the present now,” Machado says, recalling her younger years when she felt she was constantly looking to the next project or opportunity. “Now I’m just so happy to put (‘Dolores Roach’) out into the world.”
A hustler at heart, Machado will always be looking for the next gig. “There are still opportunities that we lack as Latina women big time,” but for the time being, she says, “in my work, I feel complete.”
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