You wouldn’t necessarily know from watching Majandra Delfino play Maria, the teen friend of aliens on the WB series, “Roswell” that this actress is 100-percent Latina. In terms of casting opportunities, that obviously works in her favor — sometimes. “I went in for the part of a Mexican girl in a big film,” remembers the blonde, pale-skinned Delfino, who’s part Venezuelan, part
Cuban. “I even put on dark makeup. I had to pray in Spanish, and I did it perfectly with a Latin accent. And they said.” She was so good, but we’re going to go with a more authentic Latin.” Delfino shudders and then reveals that the actress ultimately hired was the dark-haired, yet decidedly, un-Hispanic, Rachael Leigh Cook. “She’s like Irish or something! It’s insane.”
Still, the fact that Delfino’s looks can’t be easily pegged has helped her take on ranges of parts. In the upcoming horror spoof, I Know What You Screamed Last Summer, she plays a girl whom everybody thinks is a lesbian because “her name’s Martina Navratilova, she has really short hair and wears cleats all the time. The movie makes fun of everything.” And in Steven Soderbergh’s upcoming Traffic, she plays the ne’er-do-well best friend of Michael Douglas’s drug addicted daughter. “These kids go to a really nice private school and make straight A’s by day, but at night, they get wasted on coke and pot,” Delfino says. “It shows you that it’s not only the sketchy ones that do drugs.” Delfino didn’t need a lesson to convince her that things are not always what they seem — she works in Hollywood, after all. After a recent party at the Playboy Mansion, she comments, “What a mistake. Everyone you thought was so normal and nice and moral was taking part in these terrible things. There were naked chicks on the stage dancing, and I looked up and I got this money shot, I had to go sit down.”
Delfino is still able to be surprised by experiences like that because she says, her Latin roots keep her grounded. She still lives at home in Beverly Hills with her mother, stepfather and the older sister she is extremely close to, Marieh, an aspiring actress. “In American, it’s weird if you live at home after college,” she points out. “But for my family, until you get married it is
really normal.” Which means she may not be leaving the nest anytime soon. Although she has been romantically linked to Roswell co-star Brendan Fehr, she insists they’re not an item. “We always go to events together,” she says. “And we hold hands, but then I’ll show up somewhere else with my friend Wilmer Valderrama from “That ’70s Show.” She laughs, people must think, ‘What a tramp!'”
