Adria Arjona had to be talked out of quitting a career-high role: “It was too much pressure”
A quick glance at the filmography of Adria Arjona reveals a treasure trove of successes.
From the acclaimed Star Wars spin-off Andor to Zoë Kravitz’s bold directorial debut Blink Twice, she is just as happy in a major franchise as she is in a small, auteur-led drama. She was also in Morbius, but hey, everybody makes mistakes.
One of the first signals that Arjona was really going places was, appropriately, Good Omens, Amazon’s big-budget adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s fantasy novel, where the Puerto Rican-born star was cast to play Anathema Device, the final descendant of witch Agnes Nutter, who was burned at the stake in the 17th century.
She teams up with Michael Sheen’s angel and David Tennant’s demon (and Jack Whitehall’s human) to save the world from the pending apocalypse, but speaking to In Style in 2024, Arjona revealed that, while she loved playing Anathema, she initially tried to quit the show as the size and scale of the project got to her head and she was worried that she was going to screw things up.
“It was too much pressure,” she confessed, “It was the first role that was ever just offered to me, which is so bizarre. I was at a point in my career that nothing should have been offered to me. And [Gaiman] was like, ‘No, it’s you. I see you, and I only see you in this role’. And I was like, ‘How the hell do you even know who I am?’ And I think it was the first time that I felt really insecure about my take on a character because I didn’t earn it.”
If you look past the fact that she was encouraged by a disgraced author, then this is quite a nice story, for Arjona would have been in her late 20s when Good Omens premiered, just off the back of her first leading role (a version of Dorothy Gale in the TV show Emerald City), so she must have known that her career was in a precarious position.
Moreover, Good Omens was a very popular book written by a once-beloved author and another iconic one of the fantasy genre, and there was a lot riding on this adaptation, so if she messed this up, it would be back to square one, but luckily for her, the show was a big success, with the first season receiving great reviews, particularly for the chemistry between Sheen and Tennant and the snappy comedy present in its script.
While Arjona did not return for the next set of episodes, which did very well, too, Good Omens is set to return in 2026 for its third season, which is actually one feature-length episode, as a result of the controversy surrounding Gaiman.
Fortunately, Arjona now seems very confident in her own abilities, and according to her Wikipedia page, she has no fewer than five different movies in various states of production at the time of writing, including a remake of The Thomas Crown Affair and a new Superman movie. Safe to say that everybody knows who she is now.
