Written by:
Zoë Gemelli
Photographer:
Russell Baer
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this Issue of Curve:
Vol. 15#2
Roma Maffia has one of those faces you’ve seen before but can’t remember where. Her beautiful gap-toothed smile; long, sun-kissed brunette curls; and sexy smirk complement a slight Brooklyn accent and a name that seems straight out of The Sopranos. Maffia’s face has been all over television and movie screens, and her current role as lesbian anesthesiologist Liz Cruz on the popular FX drama Nip/Tuck is making her a bit of a household name.
Of course, Liz is just one of many strong female character roles that Maffia has tackled. She was Michael Douglas’ sharp-shooting lawyer in Disclosure, a Cuban-born forensic scientist on the television show Profiler, tough-as-nails Virginia in Todd Hughes’ indie feminist film The New Women and, in her breakthrough role, a fast-talking reporter in The Paper. That’s not all: Yes, that was Maffia as a regular guest on two acclaimed television series, Law and Order and Chicago Hope.
Basically, Roma Maffia is a female William H. Macy.
Given the breadth of powerful roles Maffia has had, it’s not surprising that she was chosen to play a dyke on Nip/Tuck; Liz is the show’s moral compass, the character who puts everyone in place with her frank realness. In a show chock-full of sexuality and sexual situations, Liz is the person most secure in her sexuality. A sample from the first season offers an exchange between Liz and the lead character:
LIZ: I have a tattoo on my right breast. Two female symbols intertwined.
CHRISTIAN: Double dykes?
LIZ: I’m expressing my lesbian identity.
“I was drawn to the role because of the writing,” Maffia explains via cell phone while hanging out in her car in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. “The pilot was unlike anything I had read and was exciting to me. The fact that she was a lesbian was a challenge and not a challenge. She’s a woman who has a life and just a bunch of stuff going on. So it was like, ‘OK, her sexuality. But who was this person in this world?’”
Nip/Tuck creator-writer-director Ryan Murphy loves women. At least that’s what Maffia says about his knack for creating interesting female characters. Murphy originally wrote Liz’s lesbianism into the pilot, but took it out as a way for the audience to get to know Liz as the show continued.
“I really love that he took it out, because I was like, ‘You’ll find out about her as you find out about her. Let’s not draw the pictures too quick.’ I love that about how he’s drawn her. I found that very attractive,” Maffia says. Other lesbian characters on the show have come out in a slightly less graceful manner: Matt found his girlfriend Vanessa (played by Kate Mara) having sex with cheerleader Ridley (Sophia Bush).
Maffia is nonplussed by the whole sexuality issue. “It’s unimportant,” she says of her own sexual orientation.
But on Nip/Tuck, she’s breaking ground for lesbians on television. In season one, Liz fell in love with a male-to-female transgendered woman. When Murphy asked her, “What do you think about you falling in love with a tranny?” Maffia immediately said yes.
“I didn’t even know what a tranny is,” she recalls. “Then, as he gave me the script and he directed me through it, I was like, ‘This is fantastic!’ I don’t second-guess anything he has to say.”
Though the show offers plenty of nearly pornographic straight sex scenes, Maffia’s character hasn’t really gotten any yet. Maffia, though, told producers that it was time for Liz to get in on some of the action, and says now that she’ll have a love interest next season.
So who is this miracle woman who’s heating up our TV screens (not to mention the loins of many female fans)?
Roma Maffia is her real name, and no, she’s not Italian — she’s English, German and West Indian. (She garnered the last name from her Italian stepfather.) As for her first name, Maffia says, when her mother was pregnant, she looked at a map of the world to figure out where she would rather be at that moment. Her hand landed on Rome, so she named her daughter Roma.
Maffia, who grew up in Brooklyn and started her acting career off-off-Broadway, began officially “making it” when she auditioned for a role in Ron Howard’s The Paper. Maffia says Howard discovered her. He picked her up at a bus stop in Los Angeles, and later hired her.
When not acting, Maffia writes short stories that she hopes to publish someday. She also volunteers her time and name to the Unusual Suspects, a mentoring program where actors, writers and directors coach kids in foster care and juvenile systems through theater, and works with Artists for a New South Africa, an organization that works to fight the AIDS pandemic in Africa. She loves hanging out with her dogs, Lou Lu, who is part Chihuahua and part terrier (she says, “Mostly terror!”), and Lucky, who is part coyote and part golden retriever. “When I first got Lou Lu, I was really, really neurotic, even more so than now. I used to bring her to work. They stay at home now. Having both of them at work would just kill me.”
Maffia has other talents, too: She’s an avid ping-pong player. “You know, I can kick ass,” she says matter-of-factly. She even studied with an Olympic ping-pong champion.
“I haven’t played in a while; I have [the table] locked up in my basement. But I love it. You can sort of space right out while kicking someone’s ass.”
Of course, playing Liz leaves little time for spacing out. She does, however, admit to being just a bit like her on-screen persona.
“Liz, in a way, wants to play God and make things OK. I think that’s sort of like me. It’s impossible to get — ever frustrating.”
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