Valerie Cruz returned to "The Following" for season three in a surprising manner given that audiences last saw her character, Agent Gina Mendez, rushed to the hospital from a stab wound inflicted by her ex-partner.
"I couldn't have dreamed it would be starting out with my wedding," Cruz tells Headlines & Global News in an exclusive interview. "It was surprising but I thought it was a really cool way to open up our season. It didn't last for very long before the pandemonium started."
Although short-lived, Cruz enjoyed seeing the FBI team happy and moving on with their lives after the fallout of last season. The one-year time jump sets up various flashbacks so we how the characters came to terms with the events of season two and that has "helped to balance the show," the actress says.
Unfortunately, the good times at Mendez and wife Dawn's (Kristen Bush) wedding reception came to a screeching halt when a waiter, posing as a father whose daughter was gunned down at the cult shooting last season, interrupted the festivities and threw blood in Agent Ryan Hardy's (Kevin Bacon) face.
Some of that blood also splattered onto the women's white gowns, which Cruz says will probably be the last time anyone ever sees Mendez in a dress.
"It was hilarious going into my first fitting because it was all Mendez's suits and then all of these big, poofy wedding dresses," Cruz laughs.
She moves away from the psychopaths and murders in her next project, a holiday movie called "My First Christmas." Cruz plays the mother of a young woman who has bone marrow cancer and the story finds them near the end of their journey as hope starts to run out.
The subject matter may not seem so merry and bright, but Cruz insists the film does have a happy outcome. It also taught the actress a lot about how families who face these grim circumstances continue to live their lives on daily basis.
"I approached the work thinking, 'You still have to get up and go to work. You still have to put your shoes on and then factor in, well, now I have to take my daughter to chemo,' " she says. "Life doesn't stop because these crises happen. It happens every day to so many different families. But at the end of the day, it's how you maintain living a quality life given a new set of circumstances that are so outside your everyday circumstances."
Her research also revealed the difficulties many patients face when trying to find a bone marrow donor, especially for people of ethnicity. For someone like Cruz, her Cuban background can have many variations and the same applies to other cultures of mixed races.
"With the genetic coding, there's so many numbers of proteins that have to match. I had no idea. Even your own siblings might not match you. It just makes it more difficult," Cruz says.
"My First Christmas" will premiere this holiday season.
As she wraps production on "The Following," Cruz will help stage a version of 24 Hour Plays written by four young playwrights from the Urban Arts Partnership. The New York City school provides an arts education to students from underserved public schools.
The Urban Arts invited Cruz as well as actresses Alicia Witt, Ari Graynor and Rosal Colon to direct the plays written and performed by high school students. They will receive the scripts ahead of the April 10 performances and help the students with lighting, blocking, scripting and other parts of production.
"I'm super excited to be a part of this year's event," the actress says. "I think it's a great way to make the arts a part of education and some of these students don't have access to these things without these organizations. It's pretty incredible."
Catch "The Following" on Mondays at 9 p.m. on Fox.
