I knew that [director/screenwriter] Catalina Aguilar Mastretta had an amazing take on the female psyche and the modern woman and the modern immigrant woman living in the U.S., and I really saw the need for a story told of our daily lives without being a statistic and without just trying to hit a demographic, and I felt that with this one.

I think, especially with this show [How to Get Away with Murder], we have Viola Davis and Pete Nowalk as the showrunner.

I also have to be careful of what it says about women. I get a lot of scripts that only talk about women's appearances and what they look like. I think we're tired of having to meet this standard and not being asked what our talents or abilities are.

[Everybody Loves Somebody] was a different take on that immigrant sort of life.

I think it's not an easy task because there's not enough Latino writers that are being given opportunities to write things - and I say this because I've been given a lot of bilingual movies in the past because of my career in Mexico, and they're like, "Oh, it's going to make sense for her to do this." A lot of studios want to hit that demographic, but they sort of do it without starting in the right way, which is having someone who knows the culture, and enjoys the language as well, to be able to write these things.

When I was asked to change Laurel into a Latina for How to Get Away with Murder, I was terrified, because I thought, no one's going to know how to do this because the American take on my culture is never accurate.

People follow my movies for a reason, and that's because I believe in them, and I don't want to just make movies for the sake of making movies.