Rendon’s Mari Flourishes As The Hit Series End
By Bel Hernandez
Chelsea Rendon was born to act. She has been doing so since the age of six — and not just “trying” to act, booking the jobs. By seven she had booked her first lead role in the ALMA Award winning independent film, No Turning Back. She has not had time to look back much because through her adolescence, her teens and into her twenties, she has been busy working in just about every hit show on TV and some amazing films. Currently Rendon is starring in the third and final season of the Starz hit show VIDA. Later this year two highly anticipated films she worked on will be released, Cristina Ibarra and Alex Rivera’s The Infiltrators and David Ayers The Tax Collector.
Always driven to excel, in 2017 while working with Ayers on the Netflix film Bright, Rendon took a piece of his advice to heart. He complimented her talent and felt she had a lot more to give. He suggested she take classes with Ivana Chumbick studios, telling her that Chumbick would be the one to bring it out in her. She started classes in February and in May she booked the role of Mari in VIDA. It was a turning point in her career.
Rendon’s Mari, the hard core Boyle Heights gentrification activist, Entertainment Weekly called her performance “fierce and funny portrayal of guerrilla activist Marisol.” Rendon thanks creator/showrunner Tanya Saracho for writing her character, and all the female characters in theshow, with authenticity and as multi-layered characters; the writing is what allows their talent to shine, which leads to other work.
Last year Rendon landed the recurring role of Annie Gonzalez in Showtime’s groundbreaking hit show Shameless where she had a 6 episode arch in 2019. She adds that show to the long list of TV credits which include Major Crimes, All Rise, The Bridge, and Bosch, among many.
Currently she co-stars in The Infiltrators which was released on virtual cinemas on May 4th by The Oscilloscope Laboratories and on June 2nd, will release on-demand and digitally. Then, later this year she will be seen in director David Ayer’s The Tax Collector.
For now as the final season of VIDA plays out, we see Rendon’s role of Mari become more prominent. In these last episodes of the series, Mari falls out of favor with her crowd of radical gentrification advocates; she faces homelessness; her father died in this past Sunday’s episode; and in the last episode of the series it literally ends on her, in a quandary, wondering what she will do next. A set up for a spin-off? One can only hope — but for sure we will be seeing more of Rendon, you can bet on that.