Her groundbreaking character Santana Lopez was truly inspirational
In 2009, a camp, darkly funny, high-school musical-drama-comedy called Gleeexploded on to our television screens. It was an instant hit, the kind of rare phenomenon that sets the cultural conversation. It took the strange world of US show choirs and turned it into an entertainment juggernaut, making huge stars out of its young cast.
Naya Rivera played head cheerleader Santana Lopez with such vivacity that she went from being a peripheral character into one of the real stars of the show. Her slow coming-out story saw her evolve from a typical mean girl, albeit a deeply witty one, to a complex character who demanded that we root for her, even though she could, in her own words, “cut a bitch”. She tore through the show’s tweeness with an armoury of insults, but developed from a caricature of a high-school bully into a parable of self-loathing who learned to love herself. She went from a teenager in the closet who was “not interested in any labels, unless it’s on something I shoplift”, survived a painful coming-out to her abuela, who rejected her, and eventually became a proudly married, well, very young adult, because Glee was free and easy when it came to weddings and it never said no to a proposal, no matter how age-inappropriate.
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