Te Ao Rauna & Jan Luis Castellanos Interview: Breakwater
Breakwater is a new dystopian series streaming on Snapchat. Waterworld meets Blade Runner, the show is a timely exploration of climate change, capitalism, and immigration set against the backdrop of a race against time as a hurricane comes barrelling towards Mai (Te Ao Rauna), Jax (Jan Luis Castellanos), and the rest of the population of Breakwater, a city outside the walls of Los Angeles. Mai and Jax will have to work together to save themselves and everyone else in Breakwater before the devastating hurricane destroys everything.
Related: What Went Wrong With Waterworld? Why It Cost So Much & Was A Failure
Screen Rant sat down with Rauna and Castellanos to talk all things Breakwater, including what it was like to film the fast-paced show, the timely themes that should resonate with everyone, and how the bond between Mai and Jax came to be.
Screen Rant: These characters of Mai and Jax come from such different backgrounds. As performers, how do you aim to embody that?
Te Ao o Hinepehinga Rauna: It's funny — the character-building [for] Mai wasn't hard for me. I come from a family of very strong-willed women who are very do-it-yourself and get-the-shit done. So I just channeled my mother and my aunties. And they love that, which was great. But yeah, my for me, she was really grounded, and a lot of the Maori woman that I grew up with, and the Maori values that we carry — it was kind of just tapping into that old knowledge and building her, and then figuring out where that fits in this dystopian world, I guess, which was trial by error, I'll be honest.
Jan Luis Castellanos: For me, I'm definitely not the son of a billionaire, unfortunately. I felt like he needed a sense of elegance, but also a lack of awareness because,
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