A new release just joined the best movies on Amazon Prime Video: Música! Based on a true story of Awkward Puppets’ YouTuber Rudy Mancuso, it follows the personal life of a struggling puppeteer doing shows in the New Jersey subway on his journey to later entertain over two million subscribers on the internet, as he does now. His love interest is played by fellow Brazilian Camila Mendes, who got the chance to play to her roots for the first time in her career.
When CinemaBlend spoke with Música’s Rudy Mancuso, who wrote, directed and stars in the new movie, he shared what Camila Mendes brought to it as his co-star and producer. In his words:
Well, like me, she's an actor who's been working for a very long time and has never gotten the opportunity to play Brazilian. It's always been another miscellaneous Latina role from predominantly Spanish speaking countries. But she doesn't speak Spanish. She speaks Portuguese, because she's Brazilian. And those roles just weren't very available. So I think she got really excited when she saw this as a Brazilian themed film. As a Brazilian, I think she [read the material] and was like ‘finally,’ and she couldn't wait to be a part of it. And then, I didn't realize how much she was going to elevate the role and the film in general as a producer.
Camila Mendes is broadly known as a Latina actress who led the Riverdale cast among other roles in movies, like Do Revenge with Maya Hawke, and more recently shining in Amazon’s recent romantic comedy Upgraded. But as Mancuso pointed out, before Música she never got the chance to actually represent her cultural background. Mendes was born in Virginia to Brazilian parents and even lived in the South American country for a short time when she was a kid. Música gave her an opportunity to speak Portuguese in a movie and represent her background. Mendes wrote about this as well in an Instagram post:
As producer, Mancuso shared that Mendes was really invaluable to enhancing the script. As he continued:
We went through every single page. We spent four hours one night on Zoom when she was shooting Riverdale, and I was prepping this movie, just going through different lines of dialogue.And she started not only personalizing Isabella and infusing some of her experience in there which was awesome. But she was elevating other characters' roles, predominantly the other women. For Haley, she had a perspective I didn't have, which is that of a woman. And she wrote things for Haley that made her more layered, and she wrote things for herself that made her more layered, even my own mom. And so that was a dream come true to not only have a co-star that I had so much chemistry with and is so talented, but also as a producer behind the scenes. She elevated everything.
Música marks Camila Mendes’ second time producing, with her first time doing being on Upgraded. As Mancuso said in our interview, Mendes was able to bring her own experiences and voice to the entirety of the script through their collaboration.
In Música, Rudy is at a crossroads in his life when he meets a woman named Isabella (Mendes) at his local fish market. At a time when Rudy is feeling like a misunderstood outsider, she opens his eyes, allowing him to realize the next steps in his life. All the while, Rudy is juggling the breakup of his girlfriend Haley (Francesca Reale) and pressures from his mom (played by his actual mom, Maria Mancuso).
Rudy Mancuso and Camila Mendes met on the set of Música and have since become a real-life couple. You can stream Música right now with an Amazon Prime subscription and stay updated on more 2024 movies here on CinemaBlend.
