In the R-rated teen comedy Plan B, actress and Corpus Christi native Victoria Moroles (TV’s Teen Wolf) plays Lupe, a Latina high school student living in conservative, small-town South Dakota, who has a reputation for being sexually active.
When her straight-laced best friend Sunny (Kuhoo Verma) loses her virginity at a party and realizes the next morning that the condom didn’t do its job, the two set off on a road trip adventure to Planned Parenthood to get the morning-after pill.
During a recent Zoom interview with the Current, Moroles, 24, talked about why she thinks birth control works as a topic for a comedy and why it’s taken so long for a movie like this — and starring two young women of color — to be made. She also discussed what attracts her to projects that have deeper implications and that could change society in some way.
Plan B is currently streaming on Hulu.
What resonated with you about Plan B and made you want to be a part of it?
I read the script and I thought it was a crazy, heightened, hilarious version of what young women face in America. I thought there was a good purpose behind it — bringing up the conversation about access to contraception.
Plan B, of course, is a comedy, but if you take the comedic elements out of it, I could only imagine how scary the situation would be for a 17-year-old kid. Why do you think the topic of contraception lends itself so well to the comedy genre?
It’s unexpected. I knew we were hopping into a very serious comedy, but the film has some incredibly healing and emotional moments. Often, humans express themselves and have conversations in different ways. I think every kind of genre should bring up a conversation about any subject. This was just a really smart and cool way to do it.
Why do you think it’s taken so long for a comedy like this featuring two young women of color to be produced? Harold and Kumar, which is a totally different topic since they’re on a quest for hamburgers, debuted a decade ago.
I’d like to think that we’ve grown a lot in the past 10 years. It took time for our writers to be given the opportunity for their script to come to fruition. That’s really where it starts. I think it’s taken time for people to allow people of color to be in these positions. I’m just happy that we’re getting there. I’m really looking forward to seeing more of it.
As a young actress, would you be as attracted to a project like this if it didn’t have that deeper message behind it?
I think it always adds something. I think the end story is medicine. Experiencing story through film and TV is incredibly important for our society and our culture. Whether we like it or not, the media is such a big influence in the way people see themselves and see others. I always try to look for something that can help in that way if I can.
Some conservatives might say that Plan B has a “liberal agenda.” If it does, what is it?
I think the agenda is just to open the conversation. I think the conversation raises awareness behind the accessibility to contraception. Hopefully, that can move it an inch forward and impact our health care and educational systems and can offer a perspective where people’s minds can change.
Do you think a film like this could inspire Latino parents to reach out to their kids more about topics like sex and birth control?
I hope stories like this help. [In Plan B], you don’t get a full conversation, but you do get closure for Lupe and her father [played by Jacob Vargas]. For that, I really pulled from my mother’s experience growing up with my grandparents. She was raised Catholic. I really used that as an influence to help with Lupe’s character.
Were you able to connect with Jacob easily since he has that Corpus Christi link from his time playing A.B. Quintanilla in Selena?
[Laughs.] Yes, I did! We only had one day together. But we just [punches fist into hand] from the bat. We really went for it. It was so cool. It’s just like talking to you. It’s so nice to have that connection with somebody.
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