Very few people know the real Michaela Antonia Jaé Rodriguez. It’s possible they know Michaela Jaé Rodriguez, the performer who made history as the first trans actress to win a Golden Globe and to be nominated for a lead acting Emmy (both times for her breakout role as Blanca in FX’s hit series Pose); or even Michaela Jaé, the sultry R&B musician who dropped her debut album, 33, last year and is currently gearing up to release her next. But the full, four-name Michaela Jaé Antonia Rodriguez? The woman she describes as the “regular, degular girl from Newark, New Jersey?” Well, as she says on a rainy mid-August afternoon, “You don’t get to see the Michaela Antonia Jaé Rodriguez unless you’re really having an interview like this.”
The actress, singer, and newly-minted Off-Broadway producer tells me this as we’re tucked into a corner booth at the Beekman Hotel’s Temple Court Bar Room. We’re here, ostensibly, to discuss the third season of her Apple TV+ comedy Loot—which premiered October 15—where Rodriguez plays Sofia Salinas, the no-nonsense executive director of a nonprofit charity organization started by recently divorced billionaire Molly Novak (Maya Rudolph). But before we can really dive in, we get sidetracked on a conversation about her hair. You see, the new season opens with a noticeable aesthetic change for Sofia—as Molly gleefully puts it, “You got bangs!” It’s a marked pivot for Rodriguez’s character, whose presentation has always taken a backseat to the work she prizes above all else. So, I wonder, what is this meant to signal for her character’s new arc?
