Rosie Perez Says The Wachowskis Were Cool After She ‘Bombed’ Her ‘Matrix’ Audition: ‘I Really Sucked’

In another timeline, Trinity in The Matrix wouldn’t have been played by Carrie-Anne Moss. She would have been played by Rosie Perez. It’s something else imagining the sparkplug of Soul Train, movies like Do the Right Thing, White Men Don’t Jump, Fearless, and, more recently, Birds of Prey and The Flight Attendant as part of the stoic resistance against the evil computers in the Wachowskis’ game-changing dystopian saga. And maybe it would have happened had she not by her own admission totally screwed up her audition.

In a new profile of the Oscar-nominated actress by Variety, Perez reflected on the time she went out for what became one of the biggest franchise of the late ‘90s and early aughts.

“I was horrible. As I was walking out, I was like, ‘I know I didn’t get the job. I really sucked,’ and the Wachowskis were like, ‘No,’ and the casting director was trying not to laugh,” she recalled. “And then finally I looked at her and I go, ‘I really sucked,’ and she just burst out laughing. We all were laughing. I just gave the Wachowskis a hug and I said, ‘Well, good luck with this.’”

What Perez didn’t want to discuss was the time, when she was choreographing the Fly Girls on In Living Color in the early ‘90s, that she got into a feud with a pre-fame Jennifer Lopez. She brushed that one off, deadpanning, “I don’t even want to get into that.”