By Bel Hernandez
It is was just a matter of time – and the time is now
The ever youthful and talented Justina Machado, star of Netflix’s One Day at a Time landed her first series role in 2001, in the critically acclaimed, and award winning HBO series Six Feet Under, where she played a licenced vocational nurse for five years. Fast forward to the present where she has just been nominated for a Critics Choice Award for her performance as Penelope Alvarez, a U.S. Army Nurse Corps in One Day at a Time. Nursing never looked so good.
In addition to Machado’s Best Actress in a Comedy Series nomination, the series, now in its second season, has itself been nominated for Best Comedy Series. A reboot of Norman Lear’s 1975 original series with the same name, the current iteration has been reimagined by Gloria Calderon Kellett and Mike Royce along with Lear and his company. The starring cast includes Machado, Isabella Gomez, Marcel Ruiz as Alex and Elena, her childen, and Rita Moreno as her mom. Also Todd Grinnell as Schneider and Stephen Tobolowsky as Dr. Leslie Berkowitz .
The show revolves around an L.A. based Cuban-American family, with a single mom who is an Army veteran dealing with PTSD, her kids and her mom who lives with them. It has been lauded because is departure from focusing on Latino stereotypeos and for tackling important issues like mental illness, immigration, sexism, homophobia, and racism, issues U.S. Latinos face in on a daily basis.
In HBO’s Sex Feet Under
Machado left her native Chicago where she consistently performed with the Latino Chicago Theater Company, which lead to her coming to Los Angeles in 1996 to star in NYPD Blue. From then on she worked consistently in series after series until she landed her recurring role on Six Feet Under that eventurally turned into a series regular role.
As Darci in Jane The Virgin
Just a couple of years ago, she was juggling three recurring roles on three different series. She was the voice of Carmen on the animated Disney series Elena de Avalor; Brenda Parra on USA’s Queen of the South; and Darci Factor on the CW’s Jane the Virgin. Eventually, she had to be written out of a few of the roles to focus on her One Day at a Time gig.
Playing Penelope on One Day at a Time is a role of a lifetime for Machado as she explained to The Warp recently. “Here’s a character who is wonderful, is fierce. She is flawed but so layered, and she is Latina,” “I haven’t read something like this for me, probably ever. It’s something that any actress would love.”
And Machado does love it, and so does the Broadcast Film Critics Association, so much so, they have singled out her performance as worthy of recognition. We totally agree!
The Critics Choice awards will be televised on The CW Jan. 13, 2019 From the Barker Hangar in Santa Monica, CA.
For a full list of nominees for the 24th Annual Critics’ Choice Awards CLICK HERE
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