IS THIS THE BEST ‘WORST’ ACTRESS ON TV?
How newcomer stole ‘Curb’ from Larry David
THE day before she started her new job, Keyla Monterroso Mejia “cried my eyes out.”
It’s not the reaction you might expect from an actress landing her big break. But Mejia, 23, said things were even more extreme when she first found out she got the gig on HBO’s “Curb Your Enthusiasm.”
“My heart sank to my ass!” she told The Post. “It was the best, worst news ever. I don’t think I'll ever be as scared . . . I had nightmares that I would be on the set and they would fire me.”
Instead, Mejia, who had no professional TV experience, was the brightest light of the show’s 12th season, stealing scenes from stars Larry David and Cheryl Hines.
Even better, she’s done it by playing the world’s worst actress. Maria Sofia Estrada is a Mexican short order cook whose brother blackmails David into hiring her for a part — meant to be that of a slim Jewish ballerina — on a show he is producing.
But Maria Sofia fancies herself an actress, and has the ego and temperament to boot. She becomes David’s bête noire as she bumbles, brawls and sometimes breaks out into incredibly awkward “sexy” dances.
The first-generation American daughter of immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico, Mejia said she “had nothing on my resume but two short films” before a casting agent called her in for an audition.
She ended up being in six episodes when she was initially hired for just one. Now the actress is getting a raft of offers and has just wrapped a national commercial and booked a new movie with major stars that she can’t reveal yet. She’s also in the cast of the upcoming Netflix series “Freeridge,” a job she booked prior to “Curb.”
The bubbly Mejia spoke to The Post on Zoom from the same modest bedroom in Chino Hills, Calif., where she auditioned virtually for David and “Curb” producers. She lives there with her mother and younger brother.
Her parents, Juan Carlos and Chely, don’t speak much English and had no idea who Larry David is, Mejia said.
“But they gave me all the support in the world,” she said, “even when they didn’t really understand what I wanted to do or why I wanted to do it.”
All she has in common with Maria Sofia, Mejia explained, is that she knows what it’s like to be really bad at something. Both of her parents, as well as many of her aunts, uncles and cousins, are barbers. They expected she’d be one too, and tried to train her when she was a teen.
“I was the worst barber ever,” Mejia said. “I was so nervous. I’d start sweating when I had to cut hair.”
She dreamed of being an actor but never told anyone until a friend mentioned a performing arts high school in nearby Pomona. Mejia, then 15, talked her parents into letting her apply, and she got in. She stayed through her junior year then switched to a homeschool program.
Her father, after working 12 hours in the barbershop, would drive Mejia to her acting coach, Gloria Garayua, in LA and back several evenings a week. Mejia was so scared the first time they went that she was afraid to go in, even though she’d set the whole thing up herself.
“My dad and I had an argument outside [Garayua’s] place,” Mejia said. “I said, ‘No, I can’t go up to the door, I’m too scared.’ So my dad said, ‘We didn’t come here for nothing. I’ll do it.’ He knocked on this lady’s door and said, ‘This is my daughter. She wants to be an actress. Can you help her?’ ”
Her dad, Mejia said, is proud of her but fell asleep while watching her first episode of “Curb” because he didn't really understand it.
The actress herself had never heard of the show before her tryout, although she was vaguely aware of “Seinfeld,” which Larry David famously co-created and wrote. As she doesn’t have cable, she “bummed a friend’s HBO account to watch” “Curb” when she got the audition.
She almost lost it when she found out actors on the series are expected to improvise.
At her improv class in high school, Mejia said, “I’d just sit in the corner, paralyzed. I told myself I never want to feel this way again.” When “my agent said I was going to do improv [in an audition] with Larry David himself, I swear to you, my heart went to my ass again.”
When the big day arrived, Mejia got on Zoom in her bedroom. She had planned the character as sort of “quiet and weird and soft.” But to her surprise, David “got aggressive and mean and grumpy and started attacking me. At one point he said he was going to drag me out by my hands.”
“I just felt, you’re not going to talk to Maria Sofia like that,” she said. “And my character was born in that moment. I shoved my hands at the screen at Larry and said, ‘Try it bitch!’ ”
Everyone laughed, and she was told she got the part the next day.
Mejia calls her experience on “Curb” a “fairy tale,” but admits she doesn’t remember a lot of it.
“I think my brain thinks it’s a bad memory and blocked it out because I had such nerves,” she said. “But you have no idea how grateful I am.”