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Marisa Ramirez on “Mental” and Gay Marriage

One place that actress Marisa Ramirez did not expect to see girls making out with each other was the bathroom at the all-girls school she attended in Alhambra, California. But because she already had many gay people in her family and amongst friends, the budding model/actress wasn’t phased a bit when she did.

“There was never anything in my head to ever question it,” she said. “It was always accepted and I was pretty much always exposed to gay people at a young age and I never had a problem with it.”

Ramirez, all grown up now, is starring in the new Fox series, Mental, co-starring Annabella Sciorra, Chris Vance and Nicholas Gonzalez. Ramirez plays Dr. Chloe Artis, an out lesbian doctor working on the psychiatric floor of an L.A. hospital. She recently talked to AfterEllen.com about playing gay in her new role, who she’d like to see play her on-screen lover and how her work in daytime (playing an African American woman) prepped her for her new primetime role.

Ramirez got started early in the entertainment industry, going to modeling and acting auditions as a teenager – much to the chagrin of her high school.

“They didn’t see it as a sort of work-experience program,” she recalled. “I was making a lot of money at 15-16 years old, but they didn’t recognize it because it didn’t have anything to do with school and kind of being smart and my school was a college preparatory school.”

Ramirez would eventually land a job on General Hospital but the fact that looks can be deceiving worked in her favor. “I had braids because I had just gotten back from Cancun and I just didn’t want to deal with my hair and I had long braided extensions and I was really dark,” she explained. “I was hired as an African American character (Gia Campbell) and I played her for almost 3 yrs. People in the grocery store would come up to me and say “Hey, Sister!” They thought I was black, too,”

Ramirez, who is Mexican, Irish and American Indian, quickly found that daytime dramas were a great place to work not only in terms of the exposure but also for your own personal mental capacity.

“I was doing maybe thirteen scenes a day with so much material,” she said, “but it gets your brain working so much quicker than, say, starting out on a prime time show because you are able to take in so much more material and give off so much more material in a short period of time.”

One of the reasons that actors have to be so sharp is the quick shooting schedules that daytime soaps employ to keep costs down.

According to Ramirez, “a lot of times on soaps it’s one take and you’re out and you’re done and you don’t go back. It teaches you to be prepared for that one take and prepared me in a way that I don’t drop a line and I pretty much remember everything.”

Now, when she shows up to play Chloe on Mental, Ramirez is “always ready, always prepared, always right there, my ears and eyes open and ready to go. I think a lot of people who have been trained by prime time shows there’s a bit of a pace issue. I’m all abut let’s do it, let’s do it, let’s do it!”

When she first went up for the role of Chloe, she knew right away that it was a lesbian role and while that aspect of the character appealed to her, it was a no-brainer when her agent called to tell her that the show was already picked up for 13 episodes and it would be shooting in Colombia. “So for me,” Ramirez said, “I pushed a little harder for that because anything that will get me out of LA, I want that!”

In talking about Chloe, Ramirez said that she had hoped she’d be able to get a little more up close and personal in her role since she had spent most of her acting career being the girl that always hooked up with the guy. During its first season, however, Mental spends the majority of its episodes focusing more on the case studies than the lives of the regular characters, whose personal stories are revealed in bits and pieces.

For example, Ramirez said, “There’s a little bit of Chloe’s personal life that comes in the fifth episode and you kind of get to learn a little about her past.”

Chloe’s sexuality is revealed in the second episode when she is hit on by an arrogant male colleague (played by Gonzalez) who doesn’t seem daunted by the fact that she’s in a long distance relationship with another woman. Chloe easily brushes off the colleague but Ramirez was disappointed that her character’s love interest doesn’t make an appearance in the first season of the show.

That said, she has her fingers crossed for season two since she’s more than ready for some love scenes. Asked who she would cast in the role, Ramirez put Katherine Heigl and Scarlett Johansson at the top of her list but (texting an addition post-interview) she admitted that Lucy Liu would also be a dream lover who she wouldn’t mind hitting the sheets with.

Speaking just before Mental makes it debut on network television, Ramirez said that, at least right now, playing a lesbian doesn’t seem to bother her family in the least.

“I think they forgot,” she laughed. “I told them I was going to play a lesbian but I think they forgot because nobody brings it up or nobody asks me questions.” Once Mental begins to air and her character’s sexuality is revealed in episode 2, Ramirez expects her Grandmother to want to know, “Well, why aren’t you with a cute boy?”

On the subject of gay marriage, Ramirez, who is married to a man, shared strong opinions about how long it is taking for the United States as a whole to accept gay marriage. “I’m really tired of it,” she said. “I think we’ve evolved so much as a people and homosexuals have evolved so much and it’s stupid that everyone cannot have equal rights. It doesn’t matter about your sexual identity.”

She also said that she would like to see laws passed so “everyone would have equal rights in every state. I’m just tired of all the arguments and all the controversy.”

Ramirez, a Los Angeles resident, added that she was appalled when Prop. 8 passed last November. “I was shocked. I understand that [California is] a very big state and you think of Los Angeles being so big that it’s going to take over the rest of California but it’s not. It was shocking and very disappointing.”

Ramirez suggested that all those anti-gay marriage people spend their energy focusing on “building up the economy somehow, someway and coming together to create jobs for people and creating work. Things are so bad right now and everybody’s businesses are suffering and I think we need to concentrate on how we can turn it all around.”

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