In the second episode of The Affair’s thrilling fourth season, Luisa (played by Oscar nominee Catalina Sandino Moreno) gets pulled over for a busted taillight while driving her husband Cole’s (Joshua Jackson) Jeep. The police officer asks for her driver’s license, but Luisa replies that she left it at home. As he radios the station, Luisa waits, her hands trembling in fear. Cole tries to comfort her: “We’re married,” he says. “It doesn’t matter, Cole. They don’t care,” she replies, almost hyperventilating.
Lucky for her, the cop gets called away, and Luisa’s off the hook—for now. You see, she’s an undocumented immigrant from Ecuador—and even though she’s married to Cole, she’s unable to obtain a green card because she came into the country illegally.
“The situation of Luisa is the situation of thousands of people right now,” Moreno said ahead of this season’s finale on Sunday. “She can’t apply for DACA, because she is too old. She can’t show [that] no one depends on her. It’s a tough spot for her. I thought the timing [for this story line] was perfect. There’s still many people going through the same things she’s going through.”
Moreno joined The Affair’s cast in 2015, during the show’s second season. Her character’s immigration status initially went unmentioned on the show, at first; all she told Cole initially was that she’s from Queens and is trying save money for college. Now it’s out in the open, and though the immigration story line hasn’t become The Affair’s main focus—as ever, the show is centered on Cole’s relationship with his ex-wife, Alison (Ruth Wilson)—it’s been quietly thrumming in the background all season.
“She can’t have independence, because she depends on using everything that’s his,” Moreno says. “Just seeing it as a woman, just as a person, it has to awful to depend on anyone. She doesn’t like to depend on anyone. The first time we meet Luisa, she’s working in a bar. She wants to get some money so she can go back to school. She’s a driven, independent person who wants to provide for herself. But when these things happen, it’s a reminder that you’re not as independent as you want to be.”
Moreno herself emigrated from Bogotá, Colombia to New York City in 2005, but she says her own immigration story is “boring.” She came to the U.S. after starring in 2004’s Maria Full of Grace as a pregnant drug mule; her performance earned her a best-actress Oscar nomination in 2005. (Since then, no Latina actress has been nominated for best actress.) HBO Films produced the movie, and needed her to be able to travel in the States to promote it—so she says she “got an easy way in.”
“But I can imagine how if you’re desperate, if you’re looking for asylum from your country . . . that’s the way we receive these kind of people,” she said. “It’s scary what’s happening. And these people aren’t coming to this country just to have fun. They have reasons to risk their lives and be apart from each other.”
At the time of our interview, hundreds of children still hadn’t been reunited with their parents after being separated at the border by the Trump administration’s much-criticized, since-halted policy. Moreno has a nine-year-old son, and related to that fear. “As a mother, I can tell you that I am aware of where he is all the time and what he’s doing, what’s he’s eating,” she says. “I don’t know how many are lost in the system. The parents have no way of finding their child. It has to be the worst nightmare of every parent to not know where he is, if he’s happy or safe. I feel like as a human, not just as a mother, it’s barbaric what’s happening. It’s awful.”
The Affair and Maria Full of Grace aren’t the only times Moreno has played an immigrant, or participated in a politically charged project. In Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation, she played an undocumented immigrant from Mexico; she played an immigrant again in a segment of the 2006 anthology film Paris, je t’aime. In fact, she’s “obsessed” with portraying people like Luisa: “I love them,” she said. “I’m very attracted to real people, and I connect with them very well. I can get very much into who they are, and why they’re there and the decisions that they’ve made. Before Maria Full of Grace, I remember thinking these people [smugglers] are crazy. Why are they going to put themselves in the line to get caught or get killed? It’s very easy to judge them. But when you portray one you feel for them, and you’re rooting for them, and you hope they get their American dream . . . they don’t have a fairy-tale story, so I think they’re very brave to embark themselves and their families on this journey.”
As much as she enjoys these dramatic roles—and doesn’t feel typecast—she’d love to pivot into something else. Moreno had a small part as the vampire Maria in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse; she’d also love to play a superhero because “I guess you’d have a lot of fun,” she said.
The Affair’s August 5 episode revealed a shocking twist that set up Sunday’s ominous season finale: we learned that Alison has supposedly committed suicide by drowning in the ocean. The following week added another twist: Alison’s lover, Ben (Ramon Rodriguez), may have killed her, though there’s speculation that a third party was involved.
With Alison out of the way, what will this mean for Luisa? Will Cole’s daughter, Joanie, become her dependent, clearing a path for Luisa to become a U.S. citizen? Will she decide to leave Cole? Or could it be that she actually had something to do with Alison’s untimely death?
“I think Luisa is in a desperate situation—not just the immigration stuff, but her emotional state,” Moreno said. “Everything with her is a struggle: to have Joanie and to fight with Cole and deal with crazy Alison. This is the season where she realizes she’s not part of the family, and she takes care of a couple of things, and the struggle is done. She decides for herself what’s best for her and for Cole and the kid. You’ll see.”
