Camila Mendes is a natural at playing Veronica Lodge on the CW’s Riverdale, but there was something that almost stopped her from getting the part. During her appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, the 25-year-old actress revealed that during her audition, the casting director asked her to get more “glossy.”
"I remember it being a very stressful day," the brunette beauty told host Stephen Colbert. "I was 30 minutes late for the audition and I was, like, the very last person that they were seeing and I managed to squeeze in an audition. My hair was frizzy, it was a rainy day.” She nailed the audition, but recalled the casting director requesting one thing from her. “I remember the casting director telling me, ‘You’re a little matte right now. At CW, we're glossy. Like, you know, glossy lips, like cheeks are glowing.’”
The actress, who noted that the CW formula works because they took a classic comic book and made it dark and sexy, joked that she had to take a full weekend to get glossy. ”It took a weekend of me doing a crash course on makeup,”she laughed. ”My friend did my makeup and made me look glowy, like I just came out of the womb.”
Camila previously spoke about the importance of playing a Latina on the hit CW show. “The fact that Veronica’s Latina was something that I thought was a very positive change to make,” she told LadyGunn magazine. “The fact that it’s a Latinx family is very important because we’re being portrayed in a way that not all Latinx characters get to be portrayed. They’re powerful and sophisticated, and I think that’s not something you see a lot in the media.”