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Keyla Monterroso Mejia is stunned by the trajectory of her career so far.
The 27-year-old actress has been featured in a slew of comedy films and TV series in recent months, including her most recent role as Petra in Apple TV+’s new series, The Studio.
But before she was starring in projects like You’re Cordially Invited, Running Point and One of Them Days, she was making her mark as Maria Sofia, an untalented actress who blackmailed her way to fame, in HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Reflecting on her career success thus far, Mejia says, “I owe everything to Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
“Most of my gratitude and my happiness came from just the fact that this was my first professional job,” she adds of her seven-episode gig.
Mejia confesses that she “didn’t understand the reach [Curb Your Enthusiasm] had when [she] booked” the gig or how prominent the storyline would be. However, everything since has been a surreal experience for the actress.
Although she loved “playing pretend” as a child — and took it “very, very, very seriously” — she wasn’t drawn to acting “in the traditional sense.”
“I wasn’t really conscious of the possibilities of acting,” she says, noting that as she grew older and began junior high school, she decided to explore the idea of acting and “sort of never looked back.”
“I was like, ‘Okay, this is a thing. F— it. Let me just see if I can do it,’ ” she recalls.
Sure enough, she did — and scored a two-season arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm. After starring as Maria Sofia, audiences were able to catch her in the second season of Abbott Elementary as Ashley Garcia, a classroom aide to Lisa Ann Walter’s Melissa Schemmenti.
It wasn’t long before she was starring alongside more comedy greats, from Will Ferrell and Reese Witherspoon in You’re Cordially Invited to Kate Hudson in Running Point — and now, Seth Rogen, Catherine O’Hara, Kathryn Hahn, and Ike Barinholtz in Apple TV+’s The Studio.
Mejia admits that she gets nervous working with such storied actors — and oftentimes has a hard time believing this is her new reality.
“These are people that I admire and watch,” she says, noting one particular moment on the set of You’re Cordially Invited, where she and Ferrell had to scream back and forth at one another. “That was a very surreal out-of-body [experience]. Oh my God. Will Ferrell is yelling at me. I’m so lucky.”
Her pinch-me moments continued when she was called to audition for Rogen and Adam Goldberg for their new Hollywood-satire series, The Studio.
Mejia, who originally auditioned for a different role, appears as the assistant to Rogen’s Matt Remick, the newly appointed head of an embattled Hollywood film studio. The 10-episode series sees Matt and “his core team of infighting executives battle their own insecurities as they wrangle narcissistic artists and craven corporate overlords in the ever-elusive pursuit of making great films,” per an official synopsis.
For Mejia, working with Rogen has “been one of the highlights of my very short-lived career.”
“He’s such a good boss,” she says. “He was so kind, so open and willing to play. It just felt so collaborative. I truly, truly, just feel really grateful to be a part of the show. He was the best scene partner and the best boss I could have asked for.”
Despite the ongoing list of A-list stars that appear as themselves in the series, from Martin Scorsese to Zoë Kravitz and Adam Scott, Mejia says it was simply arriving on the set of the fake studio “Continental” that became one of her more surreal moments.
“The set that they built was huge,” she says. “I remember walking in, and they showed me my desk, and it’s right in front of [Rogen’s] office. Like what the hell?”
“That is very, very, very, crazy. That was like a pinch-me moment. Because I just remember thinking, like, ‘This is f—— sick. This is next level. This is insane.’ ”
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The Studio is now streaming on Apple TV+. Episodes will be released each Wednesday through May 21.
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