If you haven’t been keeping up with your TV, one of the past year’s most buzzed-about new shows has been the CW’s “Jane the Virgin,” an unlikely dramedy about a 23-year-old woman who is accidentally artificially inseminated by her OB-GYN. The show, which riffs on the telenovela genre with ample humor and heart, made waves at January’s Golden Globes, where it was nominated for best comedy series and where lead actress Gina Rodriguez won the award for Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series-Musical or Comedy. For Andrea Navedo, the Bronx native and mom-of-two who plays Jane’s mother Xiomara, “Jane” is the hard-earned breakout project she’s achieved after more than 20 years of acting.
The series’ recent accolades aside, when Navedo originally read the script, she did not imagine that the show would be so well-received.
“The premise was really so far-fetched that I didn’t think it would go anywhere,” she says. “I liked the script, and I thought it was fun, but I couldn’t visualize how it was going to turn out.”
At its core, “Jane” is about mother-daughter relationships spanning three generations of Venezuelan women in Miami: Jane, Xiomara, and Xiomara’s mother, Alba. As the spirited Xiomara, who had her daughter Jane at age 16, and whose story arc has her chasing dreams of becoming a singer and rekindling her relationship with Jane’s father (who has become a telenovela star himself), Navedo is tender, sexy, and funny. One of the show’s refrains is the interplay between Xiomara’s impulsivity and Jane’s cautiousness and obsessive planning. As many critics have noted, despite the absurdity of the show’s plot, it’s the authenticity of its characters and their emotions that have made “Jane the Virgin” stand out as a bright spot in the often bleak landscape of network TV.
Navedo’s past acting experience is extensive, especially when it comes to the realm of television—though audiences will have a chance to see her on the big screen this month in “Superfast,” a parody of the “Fast & Furious” franchise. Her career began with soap opera roles on daytime classics like “One Life to Live” and “Guiding Light” and progressed to recurring parts on “Law and Order,” “Law and Order SVU,” and HBO’s short-lived but critically lauded NYC-based comedy “How to Make it in America.” Now, with “Jane’s” surprising success, Navedo has been navigating the challenges that come with filming a show in LA while her husband, daughter, and son remain at home in Westchester, NY.
“When I was up for the part and the possibility was there, my husband and I discussed it and he was like: ‘Well, we’ll just figure it out, do the pilot,’” Navedo recalls. “‘OK, we did the pilot. Alright, the pilot got picked up! Oh, OK, well we have 12 episodes.’ ‘Alright, well you’ll just travel back and forth every two weeks, and we’ll do this up until…November.’ ‘OK, well then all of a sudden—oh my God—we got picked up for a full season.’”
With the show’s first season secured, Navedo says she promised her children, Ava, 10, and Nico, who turns 8 this month, that they would not go for more than two weeks without seeing her in person. And so, she has been traveling between LA and New York every two weeks, sometimes only staying at home for a day and a half at a time. “It’s not easy—but where there’s a will, there’s a way,” she says. Next season, Navedo and her husband, Richard Pietronuto, have decided that the kids will stay with her in LA while Pietronuto, who has a more flexible work schedule, will commit to traveling.
“Basically, my husband has been such a trooper; he’s gone above and beyond what I think most men would do,” Navedo says. “We do have a sitter, but he’s full-time with the kids and running his own business.” Pietronuto works in insurance—Navedo met him about 18 years ago when she came into his office to buy insurance for a co-op she owned.
“I walk in and I go: ‘Oh my god, there’s a cute guy here. I didn’t realize there’d be a cute guy here,’” she says with a laugh.
Though bi-coastal parenting certainly presents its share of challenges, Navedo notes that the arrangement has forced her and her husband to better understand each other’s parenting perspectives.
“[He] has had to learn to be more of a rule-maker and the enforcer because I haven’t been there,” she says. “He gives them a lot more freedom, so the pro is that they learn how to self-direct because they’re not constantly being told what to do… he learned to appreciate what I was doing before, because I was doing a lot…and I’ve learned to appreciate him because when I do see the kids, I don’t want to necessarily be the enforcer so much because I haven’t seen them.”
In between her cross-country sojourns, Navedo relies on video chat to keep her children close. “I try to FaceTime them every day,” she says. “They’ll do silly faces for me—or show me something, like my son just started taking guitar lessons.”
It’s clear from the way Navedo talks about her children that she is both very proud of the people they are becoming and is highly attuned to their developing personalities.
“Ava is more on the shy side—she’s a little more introverted—but she’s very creative,” Navedo explains. “She is a very loyal friend. That’s one of the things I really admire about her; I’ll never hear her speak badly about her friends.” She adds: “She swears she will never be an actress…so much so that I think she will.” Meanwhile, Navedo says Nico is “athletic and also very cerebral…he plays ice hockey, and he’s always making things with his hands.”
When she’s home in New York, Navedo and her family enjoy hiking in Westchester County, coming into the city for a show, or visiting some of the Bronx’s main attractions, like the New York Botanical Garden or the Bronx Zoo. Though, at this stage in her children’s lives, she’s content just to talk with them and explore their evolving views of the world.
“What I like about their ages now is that we can have really good conversations,” she says. “They’re not the most comfortable [discussions] for them, but even ‘Jane the Virgin’ has sparked some conversations about virginity or artificial insemination… I don’t want to lie about stuff or make it easier or palatable or something. I just like to tell them the truth.”
Though Navedo feels “Jane” is a little more mature than what she typically lets her children watch, her husband has convinced her to make an exception.
“My husband was like: ‘Well, they have to see their mother, so they might as well see her on TV,” she says. “And I don’t mind letting them see two people loving each other, or seeing two people of the same sex loving each other, so in that sense I’ve kind of come to terms with some things that maybe I wouldn’t normally let them watch. I let this one go because it’s me up there, and I am proud of the show that I’m doing, and why not have these conversations with them anyway?”
Navedo was bitten by the acting bug during the first semester of her freshman year at SUNY Old Westbury, when she scored a part in Bertolt Brecht’s play “The Exception and the Rule.”
“[Acting] was something that I always wanted to do, but I had never verbalized it to anyone,” she says. “I didn’t know anyone who acted. I didn’t really see people like me on the screen, so I didn’t think it was really possible—I thought you had to be blond and blue-eyed to be an actor.”
Once Navedo entered college, her secret dream persisted, motivating her to audition for “Exception.” “I saw the audition sign and my heart fluttered and I immediately wanted to do it,” she recalls. “And about two seconds later I said: ‘Hell no… You can’t compete with college actors, you won’t even know what to do with an audition.’ I started talking myself out of it, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it… I finally decided, what is the lesser of two evils: Showing up or not showing up? And really, it was showing up.” Navedo got the part, fell in love with acting, and declared a theater major the following semester.
It was also in college that Navedo received one of the first significant nuggets of encouragement, from the head of the theater department, that would help her push through the moments of doubt that are part and parcel of the acting life.
“I remember one night we were getting toward the end of my four years…she pulled me to the side and she said: ‘Andrea, I just want you to know that I really think you have a chance, and I want to tell you to go for it,’” she remembers. “Her words were enough to give me that little push to hold onto so I could persevere, because it’s such a difficult job…years would go by, and every once in a while there would be a little angel like that who would say something to encourage me, or I’d book a job that would just give me enough encouragement to keep going.”
Watching Navedo over the course of “Jane’s” first season, it feels like she has found a role that’s a natural fit—a character she can inhabit by drawing from her own experiences. While Xiomara is a dance instructor, Navedo reveals she’s recently taken up salsa lessons as a way to exercise and unwind. Both come from households helmed by strong women—Navedo says she grew up in a “matriarchal home where women or a woman is the one who brings home the bacon and everything else.” Then there’s the shared fact of their motherhood, which Navedo says, from an emotional standpoint, makes getting into character relatively simple.
“I’m always there,” Navedo says. “You’re just so vulnerable once you’re a parent because you’ve got this thing that is way more important than even you are to yourself. So as a mom, I can completely relate to the situations that they write for Xiomara and Jane because I’m there… You never stop being a mom once you are one.”
Lauren Vespoli is an associate editor at New York Family.
