America Ferrera On Why Superstore Lured Her Back to Series TV

Ugly Betty alum America Ferrera is all about working-class girls, so when she was offered the opportunity to tackle another blue-collar gal, playing Amy, the employee of a megastore named Cloud 9 in Superstore, she decided it was time to come back to series TV.

“Amy’s a character who’s like, ‘I come to work, I do my job, I don’t need people to see me, I don’t need to see them, I just need to punch in and punch out,'” Ferrera says, describing her role. “It’s a very, very strong point of view to be coming from, and it gives us somewhere to go with her.”

But Amy’s world changes when a new employee, Jonah (Ben Feldman), comes to work at Cloud 9, and whether he just shakes up her life, or he turns out to be Mr. Right, there will be comedy along the way.

“We just started making fun of each other,” Ferrera says of her on-screen chemistry with Feldman. “It came very naturally to me and Ben. Sometimes the lines are very, very blurred between what’s the character’s banter and what’s ours, and I think that speaks to the strength of the setup. The strength of my character plus his character equals endless opportunity; opportunity for them to come up against each other, to affect each other, to change each other, and, hopefully, it’s fun to watch. Ultimately, that’s the goal.”

Superstore also features Amy and Ben’s co-workers, who each make their own contribution to the uniqueness of the store’s staff. They include the sardonic Garrett (Colton Dunn), the ambitious Mateo (Nico Santos) and the sweet pregnant teenager, Cheyenne (Nichole Bloom). And overseeing them all are Glenn (Mark McKinney), the store’s affable, clueless store manager, and Dina (Lauren Ash), the aggressive assistant manager who lives by a very specific code—namely the store’s employee handbook.

Superstore, which previewed earlier, joins the NBC lineup in its regular timeslot on Monday, January 4 at 8 p.m. ET/PT.

But before tuning in, check out more of the interview with Ferrera, done at NBC/Universal Studios commissary, in which she talks about why Superstore enticed her back to series TV, how political the show will get and why that’s important to her, and how she relates to Amy because she also feels like an underdog.

What was it about Amy that made you decide to take on Superstore?

They sent me the script, and, first and foremost, it’s [executive producer] Justin Spitzer‘s writing and his execution of this world. It’s funny; it’s smart; it’s relevant. I think a TV show lives or dies by its creator and the integrity of that vision.

And, secondly, when I saw how Justin was casting this show, it was a huge draw for me. None of the characters were written specifically for any race or ethnicity. The only one was Nico’s character, who was written Mexican, and they cast a Filipino. We are so diverse, and we come from such different walks of life, and that was really exciting to me. I could see that Justin’s vision, along with the other EPs, was to show a world that really reflected the world that we’re living in.

Superstore isn’t overtly political, but we are in an age of haves and have-nots. There was a story in the news recently about how Wal-Mart pays its employees—how it costs the general public because so many of those people are on benefits. Is there an opportunity to talk about those kinds of topics in Superstore? 

Absolutely, Justin is very much a comedy writer and writes to entertain, but also understands that good comedy comes from pathos, and the show, by the end of the season, veers more toward those conversations. I think a big part of earning those conversations was laying a foundation of character, of humor, of lightness, of, we’re not here to teach. We’re here to share stories and entertain, and ultimately, we earn, I think, by the end of the season, the opportunity to take these characters that you’ve come to know and invest in, and then tell those stories in a more effective way because they’re happening to characters you know and characters you’ve invested in.

As a producer, have you been able to go into the writer’s room and say, “This is something I want to talk about?”

Absolutely. I am a producer on Superstore and that was really important to me. I’ve been just an actor on television, and have really wanted to be a part of the conversations that shape the show and define where the show is going overall, and so from the beginning, before I even accepted the job, I had those conversations with Justin, who came off of six or seven years of The Office. I asked him those big questions: What’s the point of this show?  Where’s this show going? What are we saying? What do we want to talk about? What’s the opportunity? What’s the challenge?

So we are always having those conversations, and Justin took time to invite every actor into the writer’s room to talk about their experiences, the jobs that they’ve had and their experiences, whether they were Black, Asian or Latino, or male or female. So he’s very open to the cast giving that input, and as a producer, I’ve been able to be a part of those conversations.

What makes you attracted to playing the underdog? Both Betty on Ugly Betty and Amy can be described as underdogs.

I think the simple answer is that I’ve always felt like an underdog. That’s my experience. My parents are immigrants, they came to this country with nothing, and we grew up with very little. My mother was a single mother raising six kids, and come hell or high water, we were all going to college and we were all going to graduate, and we did.

Also, my whole childhood, I knew what my dream was, and that it was, for so many people who saw me, an outsized dream. They didn’t look at me and think, “Oh, sure, you’re going to be an actress one day.” But I persevered and I built a career for myself, and I think that my experience and my heart always reaches out to that person who’s doing it against all odds.