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SPOILER ALERT: This post contains spoilers from Season 2, Episode 9 of “Landman,” “Plans, Tears and Sirens,” now streaming on Paramount+.
Paulina Chávez has had a whirlwind arc on “Landman.” During the first season, her character, Ariana, was widowed, and a relationship bloomed with Cooper (Jacob Lofland) as she picked up the pieces of her life. This season, she juggled caring for her child along with getting a bartending job at the local watering hole, Patch Cafe. While she had low lows (kicking Cooper out of the house) and high highs (accepting his proposal), the last minutes of Episode 9 saw her nearly get killed.
The moment took place behind the Patch Cafe, where she was approached by Johnny (Mike Harkins), whom she had rebuffed while working behind the bar during an earlier shift. After beating her, calling her slurs, ripping her shirt open as he started to unzip his pants, Johnny was thwarted by Cooper, who just happened to enter the alley at the right time.
Chávez spoke with Variety about her preparation for the emotional scene.
“It’s a woman’s worst nightmare for that to happen,” she says of the assault. “I remember reading this episode and immediately bawling my eyes out. As an actor, I’ve been training since I was 10 years old, and it’s very easy for me to put myself in that headspace. I always feel like most actors are just psychopaths, because we’re able to feel everything so deeply, but it’s also our greatest superpower. I went into it not emotionally preparing at all, and I trusted myself to be present and allow myself to be fearful and live scared in that moment.”
Chávez, who has had other sensitive scenes on the show, cites on-set experts as making her feel supported.
“Everybody is so respectful on set,” she says. “Our intimacy coordinator and stunt coordinators are absolutely incredible. We had stunt rehearsals that whole week before we shot it, so we got really comfortable with each other. The guy who plays Johnny — Mike — is a sweetheart in real life, and was super respectful. We went through the motions, and locked it down. But when you’re rehearsing, you don’t actually do everything. So the first time they ripped the shirt, that first take where we went through the whole sequence, was absolutely terrifying. I definitely needed a minute to recover to do the whole rundown again. But we did it in sections. It was punching, and then before we get to a tackle part, we’ll cut, and then we’ll continue. But — I’m shaky just talking about it. It is a very scary moment for anyone to experience. It’s fake, obviously, but your body doesn’t differentiate what’s real and what’s not.”
One other challenging part of the role was facing the slurs Mike hurls at Ariana, who is often the only Mexican woman in the Patch Cafe, surrounded by white men. Chávez’s parents are both from Mexico, and she says that language stings to hear even in performance, but it’s accurate to the show.
“Unfortunately, that is the reality of walking through this world,” Chávez says. “Being from El Paso and San Antonio, we’re all Latinos. So we’re always walking amongst each other. But it is interesting driving through smaller parts of Texas, and you do feel that glare, the stare. Personally, no one’s ever used those terms towards me. Hearing it honestly just makes my blood boil. So I used the rage when those words were being said to me in the scene. It’s so weird, but that’s the state of the world right now. I did a movie about golf in the ’60s [2023’s “The Long Game”], and those terms were used back then very frequently. But those terms are still being used nowadays, and I really admire that we are creating art and telling these people’s stories, and that does come with harsh truths and realities.”
Despite the horror of the attack, Chávez predicts that Ariana can overcome it.
“I think that this incident is something that is not going to define her,” she says. “Even with what we witness her go through, you see she is still very much a fighter. If anything, I feel like it’s going to bring her closer to Cooper and the rest of the family.”
Watch some of Ariana and Cooper’s key moments together in the video below.
English (US) ·