Andrea Navedo
Andrea Navedo is an actor, born 1977.
Daytime television trained Andrea Navedo, as it trained a whole generation of American actors who then had nowhere obvious to go. She appeared on One Life to Live from 1995 to 1997 and Guiding Light from 1999 to 2000, then spent more than a decade in supporting parts on primetime: Ana Cordova on Law & Order, Debbie Dominguez in How to Make It in America, Lorraine Arroyo in Golden Boy, Zaida in El Cantante.
Jane the Virgin changed the size of the work. From 2014 to 2019 she played Xiomara Villanueva, the mother in a comedy drama that ran three generations of women in parallel and gave each of them a real interior life. Xo wants things for herself, which television mothers are rarely permitted, and Navedo plays her with an energy that would tip straight into caricature in less careful hands. The role also let her do something the soaps never did, which is be funny on purpose.
Since then she has worked in genre and procedural television, including Valerie Sandoval in A Million Little Things and Maria Shipp in Leverage: Redemption, and appeared as Captain Perez in Bright. She is from the Bronx, and the career reads like a straightforward account of how long it takes a Latina character actor to get a part with an inner life attached.
Movies (7)
TV (6)
Where to start with Andrea Navedo
Watch Jane the Virgin, and give it a full season before deciding; the telenovela framing puts some people off in the first hour, and the show is doing something far more controlled than it looks. Navedo's Xo is the most consistently entertaining thing in it, and her scenes with the title character are the engine of the whole series.
Beyond that, the pickings are supporting. El Cantante is the most interesting film on her list, a music biopic with a strong sense of period. Law & Order is where the procedural years began. Bright hands her a police captain in a big budget oddity that never quite works. Leverage: Redemption and A Million Little Things are pleasant television, and Golden Boy is a short lived series worth a look if you like a cop show with an actual structure.