Latina actress Belissa Escobedo had never seen someone who looked like her on the big screen until she saw America Ferrera in Real Women Have Curves: “It kind of ignited something in me that made me feel like acting was a possibility,” she says. The 27-year-old has made a name for herself through her roles in movies like Hocus Pocus 2 and DC Comics’ Blue Beetle, but it’s in her newest role, as Isabella on NBC’s sitcom Happy’s Place, where she shines as a main character—alongside acting and country music legend Reba McEntire to boot. With the second season currently in full swing, Escobedo is fulfilling her younger self’s dreams, and hopefully helping other little girls see themselves represented on screen.
Escobedo grew up in East LA with her parents and older brother and knew from a young age that she wanted to act. That feeling was cemented further when she was cast in her fifth grade play, as Grandpa Joe in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. While her parents supported her dreams, it was a world they knew nothing about—she was on her own if she wanted to figure out how to make it as an actress. Intent on gaining more acting experience, and with her middle school not having a drama department, Escobedo started looking into LA public art schools and found the LA County High School for the Arts (LACHSA), one of the area’s few public schools with an audition-based curriculum. “I was really lucky to have found that,” says Escobedo. “That was really my first introduction to acting and the industry.”
After graduating from LACHSA, Escobedo did a short stint in New York at the New School before dropping out and returning to LA, where she joined the Casa 0101 theater in Boyle Heights, an organization founded by Real Women Have Curves author Josefina Lopez in 2000 to fulfill her vision of bringing art and live theater programs to the community she grew up in. Working with Casa was a formative experience, with Escobedo describing LACHSA as giving her the acting training while Casa got her into the room. The room that would change the trajectory of her career was a 2018 Disney/ABC showcase workshop, where she was sent on auditions, had her first headshot taken, and eventually ended up booking the showcase and then getting a manager and an agent. “From then, it was just a crazy ride.”
Escobedo’s debut role was in 2020 in the ABC romantic comedy-drama series The Baker and the Beauty. From there, her career continued to build, from a stint on American Horror Stories, to appearing in movies Hocus Pocus 2, Sex Appeal, Side Is Dead, and Blue Beetle, DC Comics’ first Latino superhero movie. Of this last role, Escobedo says “I’ve been so lucky in the past to be on such Latino-heavy projects.” (Her first show, The Baker and the Beauty, was shot entirely in Puerto Rico with an all-Latino crew and cast.) “Being Latina always influences what roles I take, and I take a lot of pride in being one of the few Latinas right now on a network show. I think there’s a lot of power in that.”
The 2023 Writers Guild of America strike cast a pall over Hollywood, and Escobedo was no exception. Before her audition for Happy’s Place, the actress hadn’t worked in two years and was questioning whether this was still the career for her. She’d been living in New York and was packing up to return home to LA when she got an email about the audition. “It was kind of kismet in the sense that I landed in LA and the next day was my audition for Happy’s Place.” Escobedo says she didn’t have high hopes for the audition, given the current climate – but doing an in-person audition instead of the remote Zoom ones and the kindness of the producers and creators made for an experience that was a breath of fresh air. Afterwards, Escobedo felt like this audition might actually go somewhere. A few hours after the first audition, she got a call that they wanted to bring her in for a chemistry read with her future co-star, Reba McEntire.
Happy’s Place is about a woman, played by the legendary Reba McEntire, who inherits a bar from her father after his death, then discovers she has a half-sister, Isabella, played by Escobedo, who is also sharing in this inherited bar ownership. With the focus of the show being almost entirely on the two women, the chemistry and partnership between McEntire and Escobedo is paramount. And given how much time they spend together on set, Escobedo has learned a thing or two from her costar’s several decades worth of experience in the industry. “I think the biggest lesson anyone can take away from Reba is her genuine kindness,” says Escobedo. “Her work ethic is amazing. Really, the biggest lessons I’ve learned from her are how to be a leader, how to show up every day and make it a workplace that everyone wants to be at. It’s a lot of positivity, a lot of grace, and I feel really lucky to be part of a project that has such a great, gracious leader.”
Escobedo’s character, Isabella, is a 24-year-old college graduate, though she hasn’t put her degree to use, and is still figuring out quite a bit about her life. She never knew her father, or her stepsister she’s now running a bar with, but despite coming into a completely new environment, she brings a lot of lightness and silliness to it. “I think that’s something that’s such a common experience: having one set path for your life and then life happens and you take a different direction, and she’s in that position of re-figuring out what she had planned for herself,” Escobedo says of her character. “She’s having to go back to square one. For me, it feels very similar because Isabella and I are both walking into this new experience.” Much of working on Happy’s Place has been new for Escobedo, both in terms of working on her first multi-camera show (where multiple cameras are simultaneously recording a scene) and because most of those involved with Happy’s Place worked on the show Reba (which aired from 2001 to 2007), giving her the feeling of coming into an already well-established machine. “I felt that nervousness that we see Isabella come in with of having to navigate new people and a new mode of operation.”
Relating to Isabella in this way also helped Escobedo bring a genuine curiosity to her character, who she admits is pretty clueless, but is also coming into her own more in this new second season of the show. “I’m just excited for everyone to start seeing Isabella and more of her personality come out,” explains Escobedo. “In the first season I felt like she was just trying to insert herself in there and now in the second season, we’re seeing more of her goofiness and her quirks that she has, and I’m getting to discover that alongside her.”
After coming from such Latino-heavy casts and crews on her previous projects, Escobedo found comradery in her Happy’s Place castmate Pablo Castelblanco, who plays Steve, the accountant for Happy’s Place. “I am Latina, and it’s so great having Pablo there too because we have a kind of language, literally, that we speak together, but it’s just something that I value so much,” she says. “To be on a show where we’re giving another Latino voice a platform feels so special.”
Given the doubts Escobedo was feeling about her career before being cast on Happy’s Place, I ask her if she feels that she’s “made it,” or if not, what “making it” in this industry might look like for her. “Being able to come back to Happy’s Place for a second season is such a blessing,” she answers. “It’s so hard to think what ‘making it’ is, because I think it’s different for every person. I’d like to think that if I looked at my fifth grade self, who was playing Grandpa Joe, and she looked at me now, she would think I made it. Me right now, of course I think there’s still more to go—I want to be accepting an Emmy someday—but when I look back at what I’ve done and how I got here, where I’ve come from and how much it took to even get to where I am right now, I do think that I’ve made it. I try to think of that person I was when I first decided that this is what I was going to do, and she would be so proud right now. There’s a strong love I have for the craft that I would not be happy doing anything else.”
Happy’s Place Season 2 airs Fridays at 8/7c on NBC, and new episodes will be available to stream the next day on Peacock.
Happy’s Place Images Courtesy of Casey Durkin/NBC
Other Images Courtesy of JSquared Photography
- Make-up: Kathleen Karridene
- Hair: Grace Leider
- Styling: Chloe Siegel
- Dress-Supedown / Jacket- Lioness / Jewelry- notte / Shoes- Steve Madden / Tights- Wolford
