Screenshot from a clip from 'Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse.' Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino teenager with an afro and wearing his school uniform of a white buttondown with a tie and a blue blazer as he holds his backpack on this lap, sits between his mother, an Afro-Latina with long, curly dark hair hanging in a loose braid over one shoulder wearing a blue button down, on his right, and his father, a tall, muscular Afro-Latino with close-cropped hair and a thin mustache wearing a police uniform on his left in front of a desk in a high school guidance counselor's office.

Luna Lauren Vélez Is Living Our Nerdy Dreams

Rachel Leishman

Published: Jul 4, 2023 03:54 pm

When you think of the gambit of nerdy things that have come out this summer, having Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse and Transformers: Rise of the Beasts back to back is pretty cool. Being a part of both of them though? That’s an amazing feat and that’s what happened with Luna Lauren Vélez’s summer! The actress returns to Across the Spider-Verse as Rio Morales, Miles’ mother, and she debuted as Breanna Diaz, the mother of Noah (Anthony Ramos) and Kris (Dean Scott Vazquez).

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Getting to talk with Vélez after the release of them both, it’s clear that she loves being a part of these worlds. I asked what it felt like going from Across the Spider-Verse and switching gears to Rise of the Beasts. “I don’t think I have switched gears,” she said. “I feel like I’m just rolling with it. You kind of have to, they’re such big machines. You know what I mean? And, I guess I sort of had an idea that it might be like this, but not really. Even the projections for how the film would do, how it would be received, it has all been blown out of the water. So I feel like I’m just kind of floating along on this cloud and it feels pretty wild.”

When I asked her why she felt like the Spider-Verse movies were so poignant to audiences, she talked a lot about Rio’s place in the franchise. “I think it’s all pretty organic,” she said. “They introduced her in the first one and we got a sense of how she operates. But it’s part of the work we do. It’s in there, it gets baked in the beginning when you’re creating the character. So she just continues to breathe in the second one. But I love that they gave her this opportunity to just let us know how she feels about her son, about her son going from being a little man, you know, her little man into a young man and all that stuff. She sees him with a girl and her sensing that there’s something else going on with him, intuiting, that there’s a bigger secret.”

You can see our full conversation here:

Luna Lauren Vélez is in both Across the Universe and Rise of the Beasts and she shines in both!

(featured image: Sony Pictures Releasing)

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Author

Rachel Leishman

Assistant Editor

Rachel Leishman (She/Her) is an Assistant Editor at the Mary Sue. She's been a writer professionally since 2016 but was always obsessed with movies and television and writing about them growing up. A lover of Spider-Man and Wanda Maximoff's biggest defender, she has interests in all things nerdy and a cat named Benjamin Wyatt the cat. If you want to talk classic rock music or all things Harrison Ford, she's your girl but her interests span far and wide. Yes, she knows she looks like Florence Pugh. She has multiple podcasts, normally has opinions on any bit of pop culture, and can tell you can actors entire filmography off the top of her head. Her current obsession is Glen Powell's dog, Brisket. Her work at the Mary Sue often includes Star Wars, Marvel, DC, movie reviews, and interviews.