Although Puerto Rican actress Adria Arjona agrees there are feminist elements to her latest project Blink Twice, she doesn’t consider it a feminist film. Instead, the clear vision that resonated with her about first-time feature director and screenwriter Zoë Kravitz’s thriller was the exploitative nature of what people do when their power is unchecked.
“The misusage of power can cause people to do some really gnarly stuff,” Arjona, 32, told Latina Media Co during a recent interview. “Sure, there are elements of [feminism] in the film – of women coming together in order to protect themselves – but I think it speaks on so many other levels as well.”
In Blink Twice, Arjona stars as Sarah, one of the many guests invited to spend the week on a private island owned by billionaire tech bro Slater King (Channing Tatum). Sarah becomes one of the two main female characters when she teams up with Frida (Naomi Ackie), a cocktail waitress whose memory begins to play tricks on her.
It’s impossible to describe much more about the plot behind Blink Twice without giving too much away, but it’s easy to label Slater and the other men he has invited to the island as terrible people doing reprehensible things. These things, which are revealed in flashback scenes, are the reason there is a disclaimer attached to Blink Twice.
“[Those scenes] were not easy,” Arjona said. “I was only playing pretend, and it was probably one of the most awful things that I’ve gone through. There are so many women who have gone through that. It really puts things into perspective.”
Arjona, who got her start in Hollywood in the 2016 psychological horror movie The Belko Experiment, said she’s still learning about some of the bad behavior that happens in Hollywood, but knows that it goes far beyond the film industry and isn’t exclusive to one sex.
“I think those are things that I will forever have to deal with in this industry, [but] I have friends who work in corporate and in all sorts of different jobs and have to navigate it, too,” Arjona said. “Both men and women have to navigate the misusage of power. We have to have those conversations and have our voices heard.”
When Sarah and Frida join forces, they use more than just dialogue to address the bad things the men on the island have done. They get vengeance. “It could be looked at in so many different ways, but they were taking their power back,” Arjona said. “Their power was stripped from underneath them, and the girls are going to take it back. Then the fact that we’re doing it to a Beyoncé soundtrack, it felt so good.”
For Arjona, it also felt good to be acting alongside Ackie in a film directed by Kravitz – two racialized women like her. Race is never brought up in Blink Twice, but the casting wasn’t lost on her at all.
“It was never part of our conversation to make that sort of statement… but when I’m looking at Zoë, who is giving me a note, and I’m looking at Naomi, who I’m about to go into this intense scene with, I’m like, ‘This is rare, right?’” Arjona noted. “I don’t take that lightly. I know Zoë and Naomi didn’t either. We wanted to prove a point that there’s space for everybody. It was like, ‘We’re here, and we’re gonna kill it!’”
Blink Twice is currently playing at theaters nationwide.
