Amy Garcia is Hollywood's favorite Latina nerd.

From the George Lopez show to Dexter and Lucifer, Amy has consistently played smart, sunny characters, even on shows that are pretty dark.

Now she's launching her own production company, Scrappy Heart, and creating space for others who, like her, don't fit neatly into anyone box. Amy, thanks for doing this.

Thank you for having me.

I want to start with Scrappy Heart Productions because while I am sure that we have some listeners in our midst who are aspiring actresses,

I'm going to guess that more are trying to figure out how to go from worker to owner, from performer to

creator. So take me back to the moment where you decided you wanted to have your own production company?

And it kind of happened organically with Glow. So they asked my writing partner and I,

who's also Borico, she's Puerto Rican, and wrote a New York Times bestseller called Crazy

is My Superpower. We were talking how we love superheroes and we love comics and we never saw ourselves represented.

And they asked us to write Glow the comic based on the Netflix series.

And that was the first time that we thought, let's highlight the Mexican character in there that we felt could have been

more dived into during the series. What if we pitched that relationship between Yolanda's character

and the Muslim character? And we pitched it to Netflix and they loved it and they got their own covers on the

comics. And that was the first time I thought, oh my goodness, this is so cool that I was able to,

with my writing partner, highlight a Mexican character and have her be the center of the story,

even though she's a peripheral character on the show.

So I have been following your writing partner and now your production company partner,

AJ Mendez, for years because she and I both grew up in Union City, New Jersey.

And so years ago, when she was in the WWE, my mom was like, my mom's always on the lookout for Union

City Kids. So she was like, Union City Kid in the WWE. And then I was like, oh, and she's Latina.

Like, this is amazing. So you guys were writing partners before you were producing partners.

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