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" As the sarcastic Detective Rosa Diaz on Fox&amp;#039;s Brooklyn Nine-Nine (airing Tuesday nights), Stephanie Beatriz takes a lot of the piss out of Andy Samberg&amp;#039;s antics, the cop Carla Tortelli to Samberg&amp;#039;s Sam Malone. Off the screen, though, she couldn&amp;#039;t be sweeter and a bigger fan of Samberg and the Lonely Island. Beatriz took a few minutes from filming the show, which has been picked up for a second season, to fill us in on Andre Braugher&amp;#039;s dressing-room affectations and her memories of real-life Brooklyn. ESQUIRE.COM: So far, so good, right?  STEPHANIE BEATRIZ: I have no complaints. ESQ: I noticed the 917 number. Are you from New York? SB: I lived in New York for a long time. Right after college I went there. So I got my first cell phone in New York. Back when you would flip the phone up. Way back when. ESQ: I have to admit, my phone still does that, so... SB: Oh my God. You got to update, bro. ESQ: It&amp;#039;s only a little embarrassing. Brooklyn Nine-Nine is going really well. You&amp;#039;re picked up for a second season. And what a great ensemble of a cast. SB: I&amp;#039;ve been lucky enough to be part of some great ensembles in theater \u2014 I&amp;#039;d been doing theater since college. I think Alison Jones, who was the casting director for the show, she&amp;#039;s just very talented at what she does. Something caught her eye, so I don&amp;#039;t know. I made it in. ESQ: It&amp;#039;s the range that&amp;#039;s so crazy. From someone like Andre Braugher to Andy Samberg. SB: Andre went to Julliard, he&amp;#039;s classically trained to the hilt, and he&amp;#039;s played almost every great Shakespeare role. And then you&amp;#039;ve got Andy who is as witty as fk and is firing on all cylinders from his time on SNL. And Terry [Crews], and Joe [Lo Truglio]. And Chelsea [Peretti]. Everyone&amp;#039;s pretty amazing. Even the guys that are playing slightly smaller roles, like Joel [McKinnon Miller] and Dirk [Blocker] who play Scully and Hitchcock. ESQ: The schlubs. SB: Yeah. Both of them have had amazing careers. I remember telling my friend that Joel was on the show and he just flipped out. &amp;quot;Oh my God! Did you see his work in Big Love? He&amp;#039;s the only reason I watched the show.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s pretty incredible.  ESQ: Were you intimidated by any of those guys coming in? Just standing near Andre Braugher\u2014  SB: He&amp;#039;s not intimidating in the least. I do a lot of laughing at my own self in life, so I think I come at things with a pretty easygoing view. I mean Andre Braugher sings at the top of his lungs in his dressing room. The other day I heard him baby-talking to his dog in a weird Andre Braugher way. Like, &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re going to go outside and urinate all over this mother.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s such a weirdo. He&amp;#039;s obsessed with work, right? With making things as good as possible, and in the greatest way. He&amp;#039;s always suggesting or looking or thinking. He&amp;#039;s a total nerd. He writes his name on the top of his sides. It&amp;#039;s cute. ESQ: He seems so actor-y and the show seems like such a loose set. SB: He screws around with the best of them. Andy was saying the other day that he made Andre bust up and it was his finest moment so far on set because Andre just lost it. He comes with a reputation, I guess, but I honestly think he might be kind of shy. And that might be why people are intimidated. He&amp;#039;s so talented and he&amp;#039;s also so quiet. ESQ: Did you watch Homicide when you were younger? SB: No. I think I was at the age where I wasn&amp;#039;t really allowed to watch that show. But I remember watching Colombo a lot with my dad. That was one of the first detective shows I remember watching. And I remember my dad turning to me \u2014 my dad loves to turn to me and explain why things are funny. He used to do that with Seinfeld all the time. He did it with Colombo, too, set the scene. ESQ: Samberg&amp;#039;s reputation must have preceded him before you got on set. SB: I will say that Andy as a person is not intimidating, but I am a huge Lonely Island fan. Like huge. So that was intimidating. In the beginning I would think of him only as part of that collective. It was very, &amp;quot;Ah! I&amp;#039;m going to meet him!&amp;quot; I mean I know all the words to &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m on a Boat.&amp;quot; I told him that on the first or second day of shooting the pilot. I was like, &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m totally a Lonely Island fan.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ll set the alarm on my phone and it will say, &amp;quot;Get the fk up. This boat is real.&amp;quot; I shared that with Andy and he was really sweet about it. He was extremely, honestly flattered that I liked the band and what they do. I thought that was really a great sign, because I didn&amp;#039;t know him at the time. But I immediately felt like he was a really great guy. The fact that he worked so hard on something to make something good and then when somebody likes it, he feels genuinely good about it and shares that genuinely good feeling with me. ESQ: Have the other Lonely Island guys been on set? SB: Jorma [Taccone]&amp;#039;s actually directing the tenth episode. Again, the other day he was there and I was like, &amp;quot;Hi!&amp;quot; Super-nerding out. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m so happy you&amp;#039;re here. I love your band.&amp;quot; But he&amp;#039;s also down-to-earth, super-cool. That&amp;#039;s probably why they&amp;#039;re so successful. They&amp;#039;re not assholes. They&amp;#039;re really great dudes. ESQ: If you&amp;#039;re writing a song about jizzing in your pants you can&amp;#039;t be too full of yourself. SB: Exactly. ESQ: Well, you&amp;#039;ve spent some time in New York, so you clearly know Brooklyn-Brooklyn and not TV-Brooklyn. There&amp;#039;s got to be some pretty distinct difference between the two. SB: Well, I lived in Park Slope, which is probably one of the most homogenized areas of Brooklyn. No offense to Park Slope. That was my third apartment in Brooklyn. My second apartment was na-ha-nasty. It was behind a chicken-processing plant, so it smelled horrible. There are lots of different sides to Brooklyn. It has so much character. Definitely those two things made up Brooklyn&amp;#039;s personality, right? Beautiful and soft and sweet by day in Park Slope, and a chicken factory smell at night. ESQ: Where was this chicken factory? SB: It was in Bushwick somewhere. I&amp;#039;m sure it was not legit. It was horrible. Shortly after living there I became vegan. I was like, Ugh, I can&amp;#039;t. I&amp;#039;m not vegan anymore, but I had to be for a little while because of the chicken factory. I was only there for a month because I couldn&amp;#039;t handle it. Spend two days smelling a chicken-processing plant and it&amp;#039;ll be a real intense experience. ESQ: You had to know what you were getting into. SB: Oh, no. I&amp;#039;m sure I found that apartment on Craigslist or something. There was no lease situation. You know, when you&amp;#039;re 22, 23 living in New York, you&amp;#039;re just scrambling to live on people&amp;#039;s couches and in rooms that you&amp;#039;re sure you&amp;#039;re not supposed to be in. You&amp;#039;re not on the lease, you&amp;#039;re paying weird amounts of money every month trying to make it happen. ESQ: And now you&amp;#039;re a cop in Brooklyn. SB: Now I&amp;#039;m a fake cop in Brooklyn. I had to move to L.A. to get a job in New York. Follow The Culture Blog on RSS and on Twitter at @ESQCulture. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/interviews/a26278/stephanie-beatriz-interview/>