The actress showed off her baby bump at the LALIFF screening of 'In The Heights' on Friday.
Stephanie Beatriz is taking it all in!
The actress is pregnant with her first child with husband Brad Hoss, and debuted her baby bump at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival screening of In the Heights in Hollywood on Friday. Beatriz, 40, spoke with ET's Deidre Behar about how she feels about being a first-time mom, and what she's most looking forward to when her little one arrives.
"I feel weird," she said with a laugh. "I feel excited, grateful, sort of like a weird science experiment, like I'm not sure what's going to happen next. Am I going to burp in the middle of this interview? I don't know?! I'm not in control. I'm just along for the ride."
Beatriz was glowing, wearing a baby bump-hugging black with polka dots dress and black platform for the red carpet event. She couldn't help but smile while talking about welcoming her baby into the world and what she would want to teach them.
"[Director] Jon [m.] Chu actually said something really beautiful that I think about a lot, which is, I think he was speaking about being the steward of the story and helping bring it to life," she explained, before touching on motherhood. "But I really feel like as a parent I think my job is to be the steward of this little human soul. It's not my job to make them be this or that, or push them to fit anything. It's literally just to try to get them to see that the world is full of beautiful things and that they're going to have a big part of making it a better place if they want to do that."
Chu welcomed his son, Jonathan, while filming In The Heights and gave his child the middle name "Heights." When asked if she would give her baby a similar name, Beatriz said that she's already gotten a slew of name suggestions from her cast.
"I jokingly in our cast group text was like, 'I'm taking submissions. Feel free to give me your name ideas.' Everyone started coming at me hard," she said, trying to recall a funny name her co-star Daphne Rubin-Vega said. "We'll see. We don't know what the sex is. We're just sort of waiting to see who shows up."
Beatriz plays salon employee Carla in the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical and couldn't be happier to have her character represent the LGBTQ+ community. In the Broadway play Carla and Daniella (Rubin-Vega) are work partners, but in the theatrical version they are more than friends.
"In this iteration, [screenwriter] Quiara [Alegría Hudes] and Jon and Lin all felt really strongly that they should be life partners as well, and it's really subtly layered into the film," she explained. "It's sort of one of those things, if sadly you're looking at your phone, you might miss the first time that they wake up in bed together. But what's really great for me, as a person who is queer, who's a member of the queer community, who's bisexual, to see that in a film where it's just layered into the community. It's sort of in the background and they're this really functional, fun, happy couple that just happen to be gay."
The movie, she says, is filled with diverse people of all shapes and colors. She noted that Carla and Daniella's beauty parlor is "a space where all should feel welcome and safe. There's all kinds of different women and people in that space. All different colors, shapes and sizes."
"That's something that Quiara really layered into the film and the writing," she added. "That is a space that should feel like it does in New York City, which is accepting and loving and wonderful and celebratory of everyone's beauty in all of its different forms."
In the Heights arrives in theaters and HBO Max on June 11. For more on the movie, watch below.
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