Column: From Humboldt Park to ABC’s ‘Queens,’ Nadine Velázquez never intended to be an actor. Fate had other plans.
On the new ABC dramedy “Queens,” an all-female hip hop group from the ‘90s is poised for a comeback in middle age. A lot of life has been lived since their first brush with stardom, which has dimmed in the intervening years, and it’s not entirely clear if they’re prepared to step back into the glare of the spotlight. But is anyone ever really ready?
Created by Shondaland alum Zahir McGhee, the series premiered last week and stars Chicago native Nadine Velázquez alongside music industry veterans Eve, Brandy and Naturi Naughton.
Of the four, Velázquez — who first made her mark as a cast member on “My Name is Earl” and whose credits include everything from “The League” to “Hart of Dixie” to “Major Crimes” — is the only performer in real life who doesn’t have professional experience on the music side. “It’s been intimidating,” she said. “Even more so now that the show is airing because it’s like, wow, I really did put myself in a position to get totally smashed (laughs).”
Velázquez’s path into acting is uniquely her own. Growing up in Humboldt Park, she remembers going to a birthday party and meeting another little girl who had been in a commercial. “I wanted my mother to somehow enroll me into acting, but she never really looked into it.” Years later, while attending Columbia College Chicago, she was dating someone who introduced her to a talent agent in need of an assistant. Velázquez would end up working for that agent while she also going to school and juggling cocktail waitress shifts at a restaurant.
“So acting was in my life,” she said, “but not as an actress. I was thinking, well, maybe I’ll become a talent agent.” Her boss thought she should try acting instead. “I just thought I was too old for it at that time. I was only 20, but I felt like I had missed my window because this agent represented girls who were my age who were already working in Hollywood, like Aimee Garcia (‘Lucifer’) and Justina Machado (‘One Day at a Time’). Long story short, I met Mark, my (future) ex-husband, at a restaurant where I was working. He was a literary agent in Los Angeles working for William Morris. We fell in love and a couple months later I moved to Los Angeles. And suddenly I was in LA, so what else was I going to do?”
Countless people move to LA with the hope of starting a career. For most, it never pans out. “A lot of things that would be difficult for another person were open to me because” — she paused — “I have no idea why. They just were. Being a literary agent, Mark was able to help me meet a whole lot of people and he was friends with agents and managers and they wanted to represent me. It was one of these things that happened very quickly. Within two months, I was auditioning for major networks.
“That’s when I realized, oh, if I have the door wide open, then I need to take this seriously. I started going to classes and studying became my life.” Two years after she moved to LA, she booked her first role. Two years after that, she landed “My Name is Earl.”
That may sound like a charmed story. And in some ways it is. But Velázquez also talked about the more personal side of her life that was anything but.
She describes her high school years as a “very hard, dark time,” prompting her to leave home at 16, when she was a junior. She moved in with “a man who was older than me.” Looking back, she said, “I had to do what I had to do at that age. I understand why I left and feel totally justified in my leaving. But it definitely was a very difficult time.”
(Her Wikipedia page correctly lists her alma mater, Notre Dame High School for Girls, where she appeared in a production of “Twelve Angry Jurors” — “I was the angriest juror” — but it also includes the erroneous assertion that she has a brother named Nelson: “I have no idea who that is.”)
“All I knew was that I wanted to finish high school and get a college degree,” she said. “A degree in what, I wasn’t sure. I thought about journalism, I thought about TV writing, I thought about marketing. It was really important to me, once I left the nest, to be successful. Whatever the odds were against me, I needed to beat them. It has affected who I am today. I wouldn’t change it, but it definitely was a very difficult time. I just felt very alone in the world.
“It’s very similar to my storyline actually in ‘Queens.’ My character feels like she doesn’t have family, so she’s had to do it all on her own. There’s a ruthlessness to her and a hustling that she does really well that has gotten her by in life, and I feel like when you’re trying to survive — especially when you’re so young — you kind of push your way through. That was something I’ve had to undo and unlearn as a woman. I’ve had to just relax and just trust that things happen when they happen, instead of forcing things. I was very isolated and very independent and I didn’t have very many friends at the time and I just progressively got worse and worse until I got burned out. And then years later, in my later 30s, is when I started to address the trauma in my life that had led to this self-sabotage that I was experiencing.”
Much of that story forms the basis for a show she said she is developing for Showtime. It’s semi-autobiographical and Will Smith is one of the executive producers. “I had worked on a job with Will that I had gotten fired from, because like I said, I was just self-sabotaging. And he was curious why somebody would do that. I basically told him my story and he said if I developed this and wrote it, he would make sure I had a support system in him. And that’s when I really started to change things in my life and look at, wow, the universe keeps showing up for me in ways that I keep pushing away. Maybe I should just embrace it and see where this is taking me.”
According to a diversity report released by UCLA earlier this week, Latinx TV talent are still largely shut out of Hollywood. That’s one motivator. “I feel like I have a story that could be a contribution to the way things are dealt with within Latin families,” said Velázquez, who is of Puerto Rican descent. “Healing ourselves and facing the things that set us back — whether it’s cultural, whether it’s from childhood, whatever within Latin families — it’s just rarely something that we never discuss. So for me, the driving force is, I feel like my story is valuable and it can help young women specifically.”
And if the series does eventually get made, she envisions it being set in Chicago. “Basically it tracks my life up until the point where it kind of collapses for me — so the Hollywood story and having it all, or seeming to have it all — and then just reaching a breaking point where it’s like: I’m a liar, I’m a fraud and I’m actually in a lot of pain. And then actually going back home to Humboldt Park and addressing all of these things.”
Until then, she remains busy with “Queens.”
“The show is opportunity to bring out other parts of myself that I have never, ever shown because I’ve been afraid,” she said. “It’s really pushing me to be more of myself, and myself is what I hid, right? What I covered up. So it’s just perfect timing because I was ready for it.”
Which isn’t to say she didn’t have to fight off impostor syndrome, which she first experienced it on “My Name is Earl,” where she worried: “You don’t deserve to be here. You didn’t put in all this time in comedy, what makes you think you can make people laugh and get paid to be in a comedy alongside Jaime Pressly, who won an Emmy on that show, and Jason Lee, who’s been doing this all his life? Why do you get to sweep in here and act alongside them? That made me feel inauthentic and small. I did that to myself.
“And then I felt that again here,” she said. “That’s Brandy, that’s Eve, that’s Naturi — why do you think you can just step in here and do this? But this time I had the tools and was like, shut up! Because I deserve it. Because I’m a talented actress.”
“Queens” airs 9 p.m. Tuesdays on ABC.
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