[2]Apr 10, 2006
- member since: 12/19/04
- level: 14
- rank: Autobot
- posts: 1,244
http://afterellen.com/People/2006/4/iyari.html
26-year-old actress Iyari Limon is a woman with a thirst for adventure. This Christmas she went to Peru on a lark. “It was great. I hiked the Amazon, I slept in hammocks in the jungle, fished for piranhas, got attacked by mosquitoes, climbed Machu Picchu on New Year's Day, did a ritual with a Shaman on the Amazon, I did it all. (laughs) And I only had a backpack. Just me, my friend Paula and our backpacks, not knowing where we were going next.”
Anyone who meets Limon will find that she brings that passionate, freewheeling spirit to everything she does.
Her love for acting was obvious from an early age, and despite her parents' warnings against it, the young Iyari paid for her own acting lessons by selling avocados from a friend's tree. She got her first big break with a role on ER at the age of 16 and never looked back. Limon later landed a prime role in the final season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, playing a spirited slayer-in-training and romancing the beloved witch, Willow.
When Limon landed the role of Kennedy on Buffy, she knew that she would be playing a lesbian. But what she didn't expect was the personal impact the role would have on her, that it would resurrect truths about her sexuality that she had tried to bury--although she had a brief marriage to fellow actor Efren Ramirez (Pedro in Napoleon Dynamite) in her early twenties, Limon had once been involved with another girl as a teenager.
“When I was in high school, I had a best friend—I was 15—who fell in love with me and let's just say there was some intimacy, but I got really scared,” Iyari told us, talking publicly for the first time about her sexuality. “I kind of pushed her away, I didn't know what to do. That friendship ended when I was 21 and I kind of wanted to forget it.”
“I got the role on Buffy, and when I got it I didn't know where it was going. All I knew is that I was **** and I was flirting with Willow. And after I auditioned, my manager said, ‘You know you're going to have to kiss a girl.'” She laughingly recalls, “And I said, ‘Well it's a little late because I already auditioned so why are you even telling me?'”
As the character evolved, I did this whole biography on her and had to figure out her history, her past. When did she realize she was ****? What was her first sexual experience? I had to do all of that work on Kennedy, and to do that I had to go into places in myself and unlock things that I probably wouldn't have ever done otherwise. I went, ‘You know what Iyari, if this is you, go figure it out and be true to who you are.'
As part of her research, Limon spent time with her **** friends in clubs, but, “nothing drew me. So I thought ‘This is great! At least I know I'm not ****, you know?'"
That sentiment flew out the window when Iyari met her girlfriend, DJ Sandra Edge (pictured with Limon, above), “I loved how she was just in her own little world, and she was so cute. I love androgyny, androgynous women. You know, short hair, really don't have to wear a lot of make-up, pretty face, just cool and confident and know who they are.
"But for some reason, the really girly girls, with the long curly hair, always come up to me," she laughed, "and I always wonder, ‘Why don't the other ones like me?'"
"Finally one day I went up to her and started flirting with her. And that was it, we went home that night and my friend said, ‘Sandra just needs a distraction because her ex-girlfriend broke her heart and she's been broken up for a year.' And I thought, ‘Great! I'm her distraction. Beautiful! I love it!'" She laughed, "I didn't want anything serious, she wanted a distraction. And before you know it one month goes by, two months go by…now it's been 10 months and she's great!”
After Buffy, Limon went up for the part of Carmen on The L Word. While she did not ultimately win the role, her audition story is memorable and clearly made an impression on the show's writers.
The character of Carmen was originally described to Limon as “androgynous”, and she was initially told she was “too beautiful” for the part. She was able to win an audition despite her “disadvantage” and tested for the part with the actor who would have played her love interest, Kate Moennig (Shane).
Limon recalls, “I had to audition the scene where she says, ‘I have an idea. Let's play a game.' I'm sitting on Kate's lap. In the rehearsal I said to her, ‘Okay, what can I do? Can I kiss you?' she said, ‘You can do whatever you want.'
"So in the audition, I whisper something in her ear in Spanish. Something a bit vulgar, you know, dirty. She was like, ‘Whoa!' Kate got totally thrown off. So when I was sitting in her lap in the audition, when the whole network was there, I had pins on my pants and she had this meshy sweater. My pins got stuck to her sweater and I couldn't unstick myself from her in the middle of my reading!" She laughs, "So we're just looking at each other saying, ‘Okay!' and trying to keep going and not let this distract us but it was really funny.”
Although she didn't land the role, she would later be surprised to hear Sarah Shahi's Carmen utter to Moennig's Shane the flirty words (“Quiero lamer te hasta que te vengas en mi boca mil veces.”) Limon had come up with in her own audition.
Limon is a good sport about the borrowed lines, but she admits disappointment with how the guidelines for casting the part changed, and they way in which the Carmen storyline evolved.
Limon remembers, “[the L Word casting people]They said ‘She must be Latin and she must be fluent.' And Carmen is not Latin, and she doesn't speak Spanish. And her Spanish when she speaks it on the show—I mean I love the character and I think she's hot and does a good job—but honestly, she's got the worst Spanish."
"The whole family is so stereotypical. I have hundreds of Mexican family and friends here—I mean I'm Mexican, I was born in Mexico, you know? I have tons of family there, tons of family here, all over--Las Vegas, Oklahoma, Texas---and none of my family is like that, or my friends' families. That's just so…wow, are you kidding me? I was really disappointed.”
In the last couple of years, Limon had grown increasingly disheartened by the “Hollywood game” that she and most actors are required to play if they want to work on a regular basis. In 2005, on the day before a big audition for a television series regular role, she tried to walk away from the business altogether.
Limon says of her epiphany, “I felt that everything connected to that audition was not who I wanted to be and not the game I wanted to play. It just felt like it was such a façade and so political and so not about what we all strive for. It wasn't about the art or the acting. And I just thought, you know, that's not who I want to be, I can't. And that was the day I decided.” She severed ties with her agent and manager and considered herself finished with acting. This gave her the freedom to explore another interest, cooking.
“The acting thing, the whole business, drained me. I hated auditioning, and I didn't have that passion that I'd had for it at one point. So suddenly I found something else that I had this passion for and I was so excited about. So before you know it, I'm enrolling in culinary school.” She will start her culinary training this Spring at Le Cordon Bleu in Pasadena.
But as fate would have it, Limon has been drawn back to acting. While completing her Associate's degree, she took a required Introduction to Theatre course and found her love for the craft rekindled. She has continued to do voiceover work, and is set to begin shooting an independent Spanish-language film, Maquillaje, in June. Limon said, “The film is great so I'll get to start working again on something I love. The people are involved out of pure love.”
The coming year for Limon is already packed tight with new travels, projects and dreams. She says, “I'll be doing my first cycle of culinary school, then right after that I'll go to the Cannes Film Festival, then go to the Buffy convention in Amsterdam, come back and shoot the film, and then two weeks later I go to the second cycle of culinary school…My friends always tell me, ‘You always go after what you can't have. You like a challenge.' And I guess I do.”
You must be
registered and logged in to post a message.
