As Patricia Rae describes her career, her success as a working actor has been "20 years in the making." The native New Yorker lived much of her professional life on the East Coast, where she worked in theatre, sketch comedy, commercials, independent film, and TV. She also spent much of that time as a waitress and a bartender to pay the bills between acting gigs. Three and a half years ago she decided it was time for a change.
"I had tapped out the television market in New York. I had to go [to L.A.]," she explains. "I wanted to work, I wanted to branch out, I wanted to do film. I wanted to be a series regular. My daughter—she's 16 now—was gracious enough to say, 'Mom, go. I'll stay with my dad. Follow your dream.'"
So Rae took the leap. Her commercial agent in N.Y. recommended her to an L.A. commercial agency that took her on as a new client. Her legit agent in New York, however, was not as helpful with her transition to the West Coast. "I had to aggressively pursue [that]," says the actor, who eventually signed with Liz Hanley at Bicoastal, a boutique agency that has been effective in getting her guest-starring roles on Alias, Resurrection Blvd., and Malcolm in the Middle.
However, it was her own years of networking with her fellow actors that landed her the role of her lifetime: Carla, a Colombian immigrant who, out of kindness, takes two strangers into her Queens home—not realizing that her guests are drug mules—in the acclaimed film Maria Full of Grace. Rae tells Back Stage West that it was her friend, actor Marlene Forte, who suggested her to the film's casting directors, Ellyn Long Marshall and Maria E. Nelson, the same people who kick-started the careers of Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight and America Ferrera in Real Women Have Curves.
"They were, like, at their wits' end looking for this woman to fill the role of Carla," says Rae. "[Carla] had to fit a certain age range, she had to have an authentic Colombian accent, she had to be fluent in Spanish, and she had to have an East Coast feel about her. I had just moved to L.A. when Marlene [told Nelson and Marshall, who were casting out of New York], 'I know who this woman is. I know her. I have her in L.A.' She calls me and she's, like, 'Fax your picture right now; they're waiting for you,' and I faxed it over, and they called me immediately. Then the whole process began. They sent me to HBO here in L.A., and they started sending tapes to New York so that the producers and the director could see it. [The CDs] knew I had to be Carla, and they fought for me. I owe them a lot."
Rae, who is of Colombian descent, also knew she had to play this role. She was raised in Queens by her grandmother, a Colombian immigrant who worked for years as a cleaning lady—just as Carla does in the film—and saved up money to buy a home, which she turned into a boarding house. "I lived in that boarding house for the first 10 years of my life with strangers," says the actor. "Who were the boarders? People who came from Colombia that needed somewhere to stay. How could I not tell that story? I lived that story. In the film, I've got two girls sleeping in my living room and my brother-in-law in a one-bedroom apartment."
Thanks to the film's success, Rae was able to quit her nonacting day job last year and start earning a living, for the first time, as a working actor. "I don't know if you can print this, but it's f-ing amazing," she says with a big smile. "One of the first things that I did was, I got myself a publicist as soon as Maria Full of Grace premiered in July, so that I could go and meet people that I wanted to meet: the writers and the directors and the people that are doing things. I wasn't going to meet them at home. I wasn't going to meet them going to [the popular L.A. hangout] Urth Caffé, though you think you will."
The publicist helped her secure a spot in a celebrity softball tournament, where she met screenwriter Tomax Aponte, who then recommended her for a role in the independent feature Taking Charge. On the set, fellow actor James Russo gave her what she considers golden advice: "He said, 'Listen, cookie. Forget the bombshell roles. Forget being the hotsy-totsy in the film. Shave your eyebrows off if you have to, grow your hair, pull your teeth out, whatever. Become a character actress, and you will work forever.'"
That's not the first time Rae's heard such advice, but when she was younger it was difficult to accept the label of "character actor."
"[Early on someone] told me that my career was not going to come in the beginning—that I would have a career toward my later years, that I should be patient waiting for it, and that I was never going to be an ingénue. That's really hard to hear when you're 18 years old. I'm, like, what the hell am I going to do for the next 20 years? I did it—all of it. That made me realize I was in it for a long haul—that I would not have success when I expected it—I was going to have success when I deserved it," she says.
She now believes that the most interesting work is to be found in character roles. In her opinion, these kinds of roles—often supporting parts—offer more room to act and to grow, compared to many lead roles. "If you understand your place, then you can definitely grow in that. That's another thing that actors have to realize: Where do you fit in the market? How are you going to sell yourself? You have to be very honest about that. A lot of actors don't want to 'fess up to that reality."
Rae is currently shopping around a sitcom pitch that she's developing for herself to produce and star in. It's called Just Patty, and it's about a mother having a midlife crisis who moves to L.A. to become a rock star, while her teenage daughter has to play the grownup. Confirming her belief that networking with others in the industry is crucial for actors, she was recently tapped for a supporting role in Aponte's directorial debut, Absolute Tangerine, which he wrote and which is currently in preproduction. BSW