Put Dolly De Leon in everything
You can tell a lot about a character by the way they eat cashews, apparently. This was not something I understood until I saw episode two of the criminally under-seen Apple TV series Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. In the scene, actor Dolly De Leon, playing police detective Sofia Gonzalez, interrogates a potential murder suspect who also happens to be the show’s protagonist, Tatiana Maslany.
The cashews aren’t the point of the scene, of course. The point of the scene is that Paula (Maslany) has failed to reveal her proximity to a murder and now has to come up with some answers, sharpish, about why she didn’t call the police. It’s a dialogue-heavy section, the kind that could easily become a cliché of police procedurals. But thanks to the performances, it’s thoroughly lived-in, neither predictable nor effortfully quirky.
While they’re sparring, Detective Gonzalez picks through the bag of cashews, shakes it, and chews them one at a time. It’s not forced or distracting the way, for example, Brad Pitt’s constant eating in Ocean’s Eleven is; it’s just a part of this tiny woman’s consistent unpredictability.
She’s been doing this job for a long time, after all, and though you might expect a woman in her fifties and of that seniority to take her job seriously and play by the rules, she often seems pretty bored by it all. She has a weakness for gambling apps. She flinches at sentimentality. And her sense of humour is so dry that even her closest colleague (Jon Michael Hill) seems wounded when it’s levelled at him.
The cashew scene is a masterclass in subliminal character building, but De Leon’s line delivery is where the magic truly happens. The way she moves through impatience, placation, and sarcasm within a single line is nothing short of masterful. “Marriage is like a marathon,” she tells Paula at one point. “Sometimes, you puke.” It’s a good line, but it’s the way she delivers it – sardonic, dismissive – that makes it about her character rather than script.
If you’ve seen De Leon in Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed and wondered why she looks so familiar, it’s probably because you saw her in Ruben Östlund’s Palme D’Or winner Triangle of Sadness from a few years ago. Playing a maid on an ill-fated cruise ship, De Leon has to be unassuming to the point of invisibility until she and several of the wealthy passengers are shipwrecked on an island.
Her transformation from quiet service worker to pint-sized dictator who demands sexual favours in exchange for food is the crux of the story, and although the script is often too on-the-nose with its themes of class warfare, De Leon never puts a foot wrong with her performance.
It was a remarkable introduction to European and American audiences after decades of relative obscurity. After attending drama school, De Leon spent 30 years playing minor and even uncredited roles in her native Philippines. “The sad fact is that in the Philippines, you’re not a bankable act if you’re not very beautiful or very ugly,” she said in a 2023 interview with Vanity Fair.
With four children to raise, she had to work outside the industry, doing everything from cashiering to teaching organisational development. But the roles she was getting – nameless plot devices that were not meant to be thought about – did serve a function in her development as a performer. “I thought, if I’m going to keep playing the same characters, I might as well have fun with them,” she said.
Still, De Leon was on the verge of walking away from the business altogether when she got an interview with Östlund. At the time, she was living rent-free in a friend’s flat, and her daughter helped her arrange the space to look like a studio.
It had been three months since she’d auditioned for the role, and considering that she hadn’t even thought it was worth pursuing in the first place, she wasn’t particularly surprised that she hadn’t heard anything since. She later revealed that she had promised herself she would quit acting if she didn’t get the part. Instead, Östlund hired her, and she was nominated for a Golden Globe and a Bafta.
The fact that De Leon has only been in a handful of major releases at this point and yet has managed to be unforgettable in every single one marks her as one of the most exciting actors working in film and TV. I keep refreshing her IMDb page hoping to see her name attached to more projects.
She needs to be cast in everything. Give her the Hugh Grant treatment. Actually, why not give her the Anne Hathaway treatment? At this stage, she’s still solidly in the realm of character actors, but I and probably everyone else who has seen her deliver a line, want to see her in a lead role, too.
For De Leon, it’s been a long road to get to this point. For the rest of us, we’re only just realising what we’ve been missing out on all these years. Casting directors – get busy.
