Adria Arjona

Actress

“I shy away from big cities; nature is how I plug into the world”

Rising star Adria Arjona has always had a nomadic streak. Born in Puerto Rico to a former beauty queen mother and renowned Guatemalan singer-songwriter father, she often accompanied her father on tour, falling asleep in one country only to wake in another. When not travelling, the young Arjona lived in Puerto Rico, Mexico and the US, and was always seeking new natural environments to explore. These days when the actress escapes city life, she spends her time in one of two ways:

“It’s either just sitting on a beach or on grass and soaking in my environment, or it’s doing something extreme, whether it’s bungee jumping or skydiving or seeing the Earth from different angles. It’s one way or the other, there’s no midway with me”

For her 2026 Pirelli Calendar shoot with photographer Sølve Sundsbø, Arjona was delighted to be assigned the element of “water”, despite having to pose for pictures while buckets of water were thrown over her. Quite by chance, she was dressed in a “beautiful, iconic clear plastic Prada raincoat” from 1992, the year she was born, a coincidence the actress describes as “serendipitous”.

“I identify with the element of water so profoundly. With both of my cultures, I grew up in water, I grew up thinking I was a mermaid. And here I am today, in latex having water thrown at me”

Before she found success in Hollywood, Arjona attended acting school in New York, working as a waitress to support herself. She crammed auditions into her free time and slipped scripts into menus to memorise lines as she worked - “I got many orders wrong. I was a disaster because my brain could only think of one thing, which was my audition the next morning.” That said, she thinks the job gave her valuable stability as she pursued her career. What tips would she give anyone trying to break into acting?

“My advice would just be, follow your own path and stay true to yourself, and I think that the power of ‘no’ is incredibly important in this industry. So, having a job like being a waitress allowed me to say no to certain things and maybe if I would have said yes, I wouldn’t be where I am today. So, the power of ‘no’ is big”

As well as television and film roles, Arjona recently executive produced and appeared in the movie Los Frikis, based on a true story of youths in Cuba in the early 1990s who injected themselves with HIV believing they would have more freedom in government-run sanitoriums than in wider society. Arjona has also appeared in Andor and Hit Man and is passionate about seeing her culture represented in original stories that shun clichés around Latin-American characters.

“For so many years we were put in this box, and we were stereotyped as maybe two or three things. I hope that by telling our stories we can change perspectives and I can give more opportunity to younger, up-and-coming Latin-American artists and open those doors so it’s a little bit easier for them than it was for me”

One last question: where does she find beauty in the everyday?

“Beauty is everywhere. It depends where you want to see it, and it depends on who’s looking. I genuinely try every day to see the beauty in everything, even the negative things that you come across or even in people that you might not like, and if you see a little bit of beauty, I think we can all be a little more empathetic. With that said, it’s hard because we’re all human and sometimes we get stuck in our ways and have bad days. But if you’re having a bad day, and you choose to see beauty in everything, you could turn your day around”