Leslie Grace has become a quiet force on the film festival circuit.
After breaking out in the Lin-Manuel Miranda movie musical In the Heights, Grace’s next big role, a starring turn as a DC superhero in the Batgirl movie, was among the finished films indefinitely shelved by Warner Bros. and taken as a tax write-off. In the interim years, she has worked on independent films that have had an outsized impact.
Grace starred in the drama In the Summers, which won the grand jury prize in the dramatic competition at the 2024 Sundance Film Festival. And this week, she is at the SXSW film and television festival, with two movies: Jonás Cuarón’s Campeón Gabacho and Ryan Booth’s Stages.
It was her In the Summers co-star René Pérez Joglar — better known as Puerto Rican rapper Residente — that tipped her off to Cuarón’s adaptation of the 2015 novel by Aura Xilonen. “With René, we will always text, but if he calls, you answer that,” says the Dominican American actress. “He’s like ‘Leslie, listen, you have a couple minutes? I’m like, ‘Oh, I got the minutes.’”
Pérez Joglar told her about the feature project from Cuarón (son of Alfonso) centered on Liborio, a Mexican immigrant in New York City who gains notoriety and community as he becomes a local champion boxer. Grace, who plays Liborio’s confidant and love interest Aireen, was drawn to the movie’s bold and stylistic storytelling, where a traditional immigrant narrative is interwoven with fantastical visual elements.
“A lot of times, when our stories are narrated, a lot of the magic is stolen from our experience,” she says of films that revolve around the Latino immigrant experience. “This movie brings in the poetry that happens when one goes through deep, deep pain and isolation. Jonás was able to create a world where the magic and the pain can exist, simultaneously.”
While Grace predominantly shares the screen with Juan Daniel García Treviño as Liborio, it wasn’t until she was on set in Mexico City that Grace learned that her other scene partner would be comedy legend Cheech Marin. She remembers, “I was like, ‘What do you mean, Cheech Marin? I get to play his granddaughter? That’s insane!’” Grace and Marin had to be separated between takes after making too much noise on the small set. She says with a laugh, “We were supposed be going over our lines. But anytime we were in the same room, I would just ask him to tell me stories about Cheech and Chong days.”
As for Stages, Grace plays Jessie, a musician who starts from scratch after breaking up with her musical and romantic partner, who then continues to play her songs with their former band “and starts dating the synth girl, on top of that,” Grace says with a laugh. Jessie finds a gig as the opening act for Ben (played by Austin-based musician David Ramirez), himself going through a musical reinvention.
Says Grace, “As a female singer-songwriter, there’s a lot of spaces where it’s usually assumed that you won’t speak for what you speak up for what you prefer, or take ownership for something that should be credited to you. All of those themes to me, as a music artist, really hit home.”
The three-time Latin Grammy nominee began her music career in her teens. Both Campeón Gabacho and Stages filmed while Grace took a self-imposed hiatus from music, deciding she didn’t have the energy to focus on songwriting and recording while also pursuing an acting career.
Stages resonated with Grace as a musician, she says, “I really connected to what it feels like to hold on to the one thing that is your biggest passion, the thing that is most synonymous with, but it’s been tough and it’s not necessarily giving you back what you thought that it would give you.”
It was during production on Stages, two years into her break from music, when Grace rediscovered a love for performing. At the time, she was feeling fearful of singing, she says, “which I had never experienced in my life.” Singing and writing music as her character, Jessie, let her perform without the pressure of doing so as a part of her own music career. Inadvertently, Stages created a sheltered space where she could practice being a musician again.
By the time Stages wrapped production, Grace made the choice to record a new album, and on May 1, she will release Amor, Quién Eres?, her first full-length album since she was 17.
Grace says her time on film sets, from studio tentpoles to indie features, made her realize a desire to be involved in every part of the creative process, from songwriting to the social media rollout. She says, “I never really took the time to create a creative process that I felt was mine. I allowed other people to create it for me.” And rather than focus on singles, Grace created her album as a holistic experience. Like a movie, she wants it “to be consumed as a whole.”
But before the album, Grace is pulling double-duty in Austin with her back-to-back films. She says, “Today, there are a bunch of multi-hyphenate artists. And I think most people who have different crafts would say the same: None of them feel separate.”
