Stephanie Beatriz

“I think the first concert I ever went to was maybe a Five Iron Frenzy concert or something when I was in high school.”

“A lot of animated movies in the past have sort of relied on these archaic tropes on what the female characters in those movies can be and who they are.”

“I'm pan-Latino, or whatever that phrase is. It's not a sexy phrase, but it is a sexy, cool thing. That's how I feel.”

“As a kid, I really, truly believed that if you swallowed a watermelon seed, something really bad was going to happen.”

“I think you can tell the difference between 'swagger' and real confidence immediately. You can smell it, like bad body spray versus nice cologne.”

“When you're 22, 23, living in New York, you're just scrambling to live on people's couches and in rooms that you're sure you're not supposed to be in. You're not on the lease; you're paying weird amounts of money every month trying to make it happen.”

“It's hard to make friends as an adult. You gotta work at it, you know? You have to ask people to lunch, and if you don't know them, it's weird.”

“I lived in Park Slope, which is probably one of the most homogenized areas of Brooklyn. No offense to Park Slope.”

“I used to be on dance team in high school; it was called drill team in Texas. And when I started doing theater sophomore year, I had to make a decision which thing I was gonna follow. It was a big shift because I sort of had all these friends on dance squad, and when I started to do theater, my whole identity shifted.”

“What I would love is for a normalization of queer characters on TV.”

“Nannies are amazing human beings.”

“That's, to me, the ultimate goal - to disappear inside another character and bring them so fully to life that I've convinced other human beings that it's a real person.”

“If you're writing a bi character, did you look at a lot of bi actors for the role? Did you really go and find people that identified as queer? If you did, then great, and if you didn't find anyone you liked in that pool, well, that's surprising. If you write a character that's trans, the time is now - cast a trans actor.”

“I'm not really a super-serious person. I guess in some ways I am, but I do like to have a lot of fun. I mean, one of my favorite places in the world is Disney World, so that'll tell you a little bit about me.”

“The playing ground is so uneven, and there have been so many straight characters for such a long time, and so many gay actors that have had to hide their sexuality to get the parts they want to play.”

“I remember watching 'Colombo' a lot with my dad. That was one of the first detective shows I remember watching. And I remember my dad turning to me - my dad loves to turn to me and explain why things are funny. He used to do that with 'Seinfeld' all the time. He did it with 'Colombo', too, set the scene.”

“I know all the words to 'I'm on a Boat.'”

“I do a lot of laughing at my own self in life, so I think I come at things with a pretty easygoing view.”

“'Brooklyn Nine-Nine' is an idealized, fun comedy world in which feminism is an underlying value that all the characters have. Equality is a value all the characters have. I mean, I want to live in that world. I'd like to make the world feel more like that, but I understand that it's a fantasy.”

“When you label somebody and put them in a box, then you put the lid on the box, and you just never look inside again. I think it's much more interesting for human beings to look at each other's stories and see each other. Really see each other and then see themselves through other people's stories. That's where you start to break down stereotypes.”