Justina Machado may have sank her teeth into playing the murderous title character in “The Horror of Dolores Roach” — but she didn’t do it alone.
The new Prime Video series, premiering Friday, stars the “One Day at a Time” actress as a homicidal ex-con alongside Alejandro Hernandez’s Luis, a conspiring chef who disposes of her bodies by turning them into must-have Muy Loco empanadas.
“They’re toxic together,” she told TheWrap of the unlikely dynamic. “His crazy is crazier than her crazy, yet they need each other right now. They depend on each other. She even says it, like, no one’s ever done what he’s done for her. It’s sick. It’s twisted. But no one has ever done that… So she feels a sense of loyalty towards him.
The series is based on characters created by Aaron Mark, who turned his “Sweeney Todd”-inspired play into a hit podcast with Daphne Rubin-Vega as Dolores. Listening to Rubin-Vega’s voice performance, Machado hoped to one day play the murderous masseuse.
“I thought, ‘Whoa, what a part,” she recalled “‘Oh my goodness, Daphne is so lucky. I would love to play a part like that.’”
Machado’s wish came true when she was sent the script for the TV series adaptation. “As soon as I got the script, I knew that I would play the part,” she said. “Sometimes that happens. It doesn’t always happen, but it happens. I really went for it. I went for all the crazy.”
Even though Dolores is a serial killer, Machado draws sympathy from the audience by leaning into Dolores’ plight as a down-on-her-luck woman whose first victim is a racist, sexist landlord who threatens to bring her post-prison life crashing down.
“You know, you root for her,” the actress says. “You have compassion for and empathy for her. Absolutely.”
Machado, previously a SAG Award winner and Critics Choice Award nominee, added that there were certain aspects of her own experience that allowed her to relate to Dolores’ anger.
“Listen, as a Latina woman, I’ve dealt with a lot of racism in my life. I’ve dealt with a lot of stupid s–t that people have said and that you can’t fight all the time,” she said. “But there’s something in her that snaps. ‘I am not going to let anybody take anything away from me anymore.’ It’s like she’s finally found something. She’s finally surviving, getting out of jail…. And then all of a sudden, here comes this man ready to disrupt her life once again? She just snaps.”
All eight episodes of “The Horror of Dolores Roach” premiere Friday on Prime Video.
