Adria Arjona has been climbing up the Hollywood ladder for years now, but Netflix’s new movie Hit Man might be what finally turns her into a superstar.
Arjona plays Madison Masters in the action rom-com directed by the Before trilogy’s Richard Linklater, and co-written by him and Glen Powell. The character starts as the victim of an abusive husband who wants to hire Powell’s hitman to kill him but soon evolves into a complicated and fascinating femme fatale type of deuteragonist. And Arjona nails every beat.
The film hinges on the leading duo’s chemistry as the hitman (who, unbeknownst to Madison, is working undercover for the police) falls for his client and begins blurring the lines between real and pretend.
An almost perfect critics score on Rotten Tomatoes points towards Hit Man potentially becoming a streaming hit on Netflix when it premieres June 7. With how magnetic Arjona is in it, it could and should cause her career to blow up, but if her face looks familiar, it’s because it is. The Puerto Rican-Guatemalan actress has been hitting the grind since 2012.
Adria Arjona’s most popular movies and television shows
Although Hit Man is arguably Arjona’s biggest movie role yet, the 32-year-old actress’ CV is vast, and it includes some pretty major productions from the last decade — well, some more major than others.
It doesn’t get bigger than Star Wars, and Arjona got to be a pretty important part of one of the franchise’s best offerings of the Disney era, the 2022 series Andor. The actress plays Bix Caleen, Cassian’s ex-girlfriend and trusted ally in the show, and is expected to return for its second season.
Although not comparable to Star Wars in scope, but certainly comparable in the passion of its fans is Good Omens, the Amazon MGM/BBC series created by Neil Gaiman in 2019. In the show’s first season, Arjona played Anathema Device, the descendant of the last true witch in England. On television, the actress was also in 2022’s Irma Vep miniseries, and in Emerald City, an NBC show based on Oz that sadly only lasted for a season, where Arjona played none other than Dorothy Gale.
On the silver screen, Arjona’s portfolio is even more diverse. Before Hit Man, she was perhaps more recognizably cast in Sony/Marvel’s comically bad film Morbius, and in Michael Bay’s 6 Underground alongside Ryan Reynolds.
The actress, who got her start in True Detective in 2015, was also part of the supporting cast of smaller films like 2021’s Sweet Girl, 2018’s Life of the Party, and 2019’s Triple Frontier. In 2022, she starred in the Cuban-American remake of Father of the Bride as Sofia Herrera, the titular bride and daughter of Andy García’s titular father.
In the pipeline for Arjona are Zoë Kravitz’ directorial debut Blink Twice and Los Frikis, a movie that caused a sensation at the 2024 Miami Film Festival.