“We’re off to a great start,” Camila Mendes croons from the other side of her screen, her eyes wide with amusement and her sharp, chin-grazing bob almost perking up at the sound of my voice. Within minutes of logging on to our Zoom call, my Miami-laced tone tips her off to our similar backgrounds. We both grew up in South Florida suburbia, a humid, heatwave-filled swampland that’s both increasingly chaotic and painfully claustrophobic at the same time. She puts it best when she states that our hometown, and the bubble it occupies in our origin stories, is like another world.
Maybe that’s why our hour-long interview feels strangely familiar, much more akin to a reality-television confessional than a prim-and-proper affair. She talks about her fitness routine and starring in a Mr. Fantasy (rumored to be her former Riverdale costar KJ Apa) music video. When Mendes learns we graduated from the same high school, only a few years apart, our conversation derails into a trauma-bonding session uniquely reserved for those of us who survived South Florida adolescence. By the end, talking to Mendes feels much less like interviewing a celebrity and more like catching up with a cool upperclassman I would have passed in the hallway all those years ago.
The ease and flow of our conversation almost distracts me from how, unlike the hazy, slow life most people live in Miami, Mendes is in the middle of one of the biggest years in her career so far. In the first half of 2026 alone, she’s been attached to three separate upcoming projects; her cofounded production company, Honor Role, just released its second feature film, Idiotka; and somewhere in the middle of it all, she’s planning a wedding to longtime partner and former Música costar Rudy Mancuso.
And then, of course, there’s the small matter of starring in a major summer blockbuster. This month, Mendes steps into the sprawling, nostalgia-drenched world of Masters of the Universe, the live-action reimagining of the beloved ’80s He-Man franchise starring Nicholas Galitzine, Idris Elba, and Jared Leto. In it, Mendes plays the sword-slinging Teela, who teams up with Prince Adam, played by Galitzine, to defend their home planet of Eternia from the evil wrath of Skeletor. It’s the kind of studio summer spectacle built for oversize budgets, Comic Con hysteria, and inevitable internet discourse. Masters is the largest stage Mendes has occupied since her breakout years as Riverdale’s resident mean girl, Veronica Lodge. No big deal or anything.
“I’ve never been a part of something of this scale. I’ve never been a part of a proper press tour before, and I hear it’s really chaotic in a fun way but also really exhausting,” Mendes admits, nodding to the high-intensity demands of the cast’s global premieres rolling out over the next several weeks. It’s a whirlwind of red carpets, international red-eye flights, and press-tour obligations with no educational crash course to help one prepare. But Mendes is used to it. She stays busy. Her life in this era, she jokes, is not unlike the infamous Lady Gaga meme: “No sleep. Bus, club, another club, another club, next place.” The image tracks.
Despite what her hectic schedule may imply, or the fact that Mendes’s name stays in the headlines of Deadline articles posted across Instagram by talent agencies and stan accounts, she loves having nothing to do. “I’m not someone who seeks busyness, genuinely, and I feel like if you’d talk to any of my friends or family, they’d laugh at me for saying that,” Mendes notes. “I think I’ve gotten a lot better at saying no to things as I’ve gotten older.”
There’s a surprising steadiness to Mendes when we speak, the kind that feels slightly at odds with the hypervisibility that’s followed her since Riverdale catapulted her into mainstream recognition nearly a decade ago. Despite only being a few years older than me, she speaks with the kind of emotional clarity that usually only arrives after either a complete existential unraveling or a very expensive wellness retreat—or in Mendes’s case, both.
In 2024, the actor attended the Hoffman Process, a personal-growth retreat beloved by a very specific subset of spiritually curious celebrities—think Gwyneth Paltrow, Justin Bieber, Katy Perry, and Sienna Miller. The retreat, structured as an intensive seven-day program, has become something of a rite of passage for Hollywood figures attempting to untangle themselves from years of industry burnout. Mendes’s decision to go came at a particularly loaded moment in her life: fresh off the heels of her Saturn Return and after Riverdale’s seven-season run came to a close—a chapter of her life that, for nearly her entire adult career up until that point, dictated everything from her public identity to the rhythm of her day-to-day existence. What happens after the role that made you who you are becomes past tense?
It’s no surprise the actor needed to figure out what was next in the void of insurmountable change. “I was going through a period in my life where I didn’t know how to say no. I kept blaming the world, kept blaming everybody but myself for being busy, and had so much anger,” Mendes admits. “That experience at Hoffman really helped me clarify for myself what my priorities are and what I want out of life. I now have such an easier time determining what’s worth my time and what isn’t.”
That emotional clarity has seeped into the way Mendes approaches acting, too. Despite starring in increasingly larger-scale productions—where performance can often feel more manufactured than personal—Mendes insists the work only clicks for her when it comes from a place of authenticity. “To me, acting is being truthful, and that’s why it comes more naturally to me,” she says. It’s why she speaks about her characters less like fictional creations and more like emotional extensions of herself. Whether it’s Veronica Lodge or Teela, Mendes feels protective of every woman she plays. They all carry fragments of her.
On paper, Teela and Mendes don’t exactly seem spiritually aligned. One is a sword-wielding fantasy warrior born out of an ’80s toy empire, and the other is an actor who speaks thoughtfully about boundaries, emotional healing, and the importance of doing absolutely nothing whenever possible—their hair colors don’t even match—but Mendes insists that stepping into Teela’s world revealed more of herself than she initially expected.
In many ways, Teela’s emotional arc mirrors the lesson Mendes says she’s only recently begun learning in her own life: Softness isn’t weakness. You don’t have to become emotionally detached to be powerful.
Strength, particularly for female superheroes on-screen, is so often written as emotional restraint, Mendes says, noting she’s often felt disconnected from several on-screen female superheroes in the past. “To me, Teela’s journey in this film is about finding strength in vulnerability. Teela was really in touch with her physical strength but not so much with her emotional side,” Mendes adds. “In her mind, she’s like, ‘I’m on my own in this world. Everyone is incompetent, and I need to take care of everything,’ but at the end of the day, there’s just a really sad little girl inside of her who feels abandoned.”
The 2026 reimaging of the world that He-Man, Teela, and the rest of the Masters of the Universe characters live in feels fitting for this moment. There’s a reason director Travis Knight and the rest of the cast felt compelled to tell the story of Prince Adam of Eternia, unlocking his inner strength by accessing his emotional, vulnerable side. We’re living in a cultural moment increasingly defined by hyperperformed masculinity—where dominance is mistaken for confidence, emotional detachment gets reframed as power, and entire online ecosystems profit off convincing young men that empathy is weakness. Against that backdrop, Masters feels less like a reinvention and more like a course correction.
Despite acknowledging that, though, Mendes assures me there’s no woke Hollywood agenda the movie is trying to force-feed audiences, despite what some circles of the internet will have you believe. “There is no agenda other than to breathe life back into a very beloved franchise,” she urges. “But it just so happens that one of the themes explored in this movie is masculinity—to be expected in a movie about a character named He-Man,” Mendes adds, referencing Galitzine’s layered portrayal of the iconic hero. “It’s not just about how masculinity can hinder us but also how it can help us.”
In a direct contrast to He-Man, Teela’s entire worldview hinges on self-reliance: survive first, soften later. Mendes realized early on that embodying that mentality meant rebuilding not just the character emotionally but herself physically. Then came the muscles. Lots of them.
“Honestly, training was one of the most exciting parts of Masters for me,” Mendes recalls fondly. Alongside Galitzine, the actor spent months training in Los Angeles and London with stunt coordinators, nutritionists, and physicians to achieve the yoked-up look of Eternia’s royal battalion. But Mendes’s transformation wasn’t just about looking convincing while wielding a sword or surviving grueling stunts—it became something unexpectedly personal.
In a genre where female superheroes are often expected to appear impossibly lean while somehow possessing superhuman strength, Mendes wanted Teela’s body to look like she could fly planes and jump off of freeways, no suspension of disbelief required. “A really valuable lesson for me was realizing that not only does strength look different on everybody, but being strong and looking strong are two different things,” Mendes notes. Health is wealth, as they say. Mendes isn’t buying it, though.
“Our image of what strong looks like is really distorted,” Mendes adds. Deliberately gaining weight, even for a role, was something that might have terrified the actor in her 20s. Mendes has spoken candidly in the past about her struggle with and recovery from an eating disorder. For years, thinness felt synonymous with success. Today, Mendes’s experience in becoming bigger, even if just for the span of a few months while filming as Teela, is something she almost misses. “I didn’t want to lose all of my hard work,” she admits, looking back at the experience. “It took so long to get there. It’s so challenging, and then you become so proud of your muscles and how strong you feel.”
Mendes’s reinvention, both physically and emotionally, is a theme that’s been bubbling up in her life over the last few years. Before venturing to the planet of Eternia, Mendes had worked on a few acting projects outside of Riverdale. There was Do Revenge, a campy, teenage dramedy opposite Stranger Things actor Maya Hawke; Upgraded, a glossy Netflix rom-com about the fine-art world; and Música, a semibiographical coming-of-age Brazilian American love story that was just as important on-screen as it was off (Mendes famously met her now-fiancé Rudy Mancuso on set). Project by project, Mendes began reconstructing an identity that existed separately from the corporate CW machine that first made her famous mere months after graduating from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
“Once I started to do other projects outside of Riverdale, I really started to gain my sense of self back,” Mendes admits, reflecting on the bubble she and her costars turned best friends, Lili Reinhart, Madelaine Petsch, and KJ Apa, lived in over the course of seven years. There was an element of surrendering herself to the script—she says she was just a 22-year-old girl showing up to collect a paycheck at her first job—and a relief that came with the knowledge that sometimes, things were out of her control. “I had to detach myself from overidentifying with my role on the show and what it meant to people,” Mendes notes, alluding to the all-encompassing fan wars and Tumblr discourse that are synonymous with teenage sitcom culture. “I put a lot of pressure on myself, and I let the comments penetrate my mind too much.”
It wasn’t until launching her production studio, Honor Role, that Mendes found her respite from the chaos of the industry. Amid the 2023 SAG-AFTRA writers and actor strikes and small but mighty career burnout, Mendes and fellow actor Rachel Matthews launched their incubator-style production company rooted in storytelling on an auteur scale, offering first-time writers and directors a platform to create.
“Honor Role has reminded me of my own creative abilities outside of performing, and it’s reconnected me to my own autonomy,” Mendes explains. “Having my own production company is like tapping into my own inner power. It’s something I can always fall back on if I’m not seeing a certain role or project in the industry. We can just go out and create it ourselves.”
Mendes, lovingly, makes movies for the “girls and gays,” she states. Just like her on-screen roles, her work at Honor Role is no different. The company launched its first project with a queer coming-of-age indie, Griffin in Summer, which was honored at the GLAAD Media Awards. Next up was Idiotka, a recently released immigrant-focused comedy that touches on the perils of the fashion industry and the reality-TV ecosystem. There are dozens of projects in Mendes’s back pocket she can’t wait to produce when the time is right, she shares, particularly those with a Latin focus. Being Brazilian American, Mendes never saw herself reflected on-screen in a nuanced, major role and, to this day, doesn’t.
“There are not a lot of us out there being positioned or offered meaty roles that will garner them Oscars one day,” she notes, adding that she can count the number of breakout, executive-respected Latin actors on her fingers. She dishes about a project that she’s been developing for years, starring an all-Latina ensemble, and you can practically hear the quiver in her voice when she breaks down what it means to her. “Being Latin has only served my artistry, and I think a lot of my peers would say the same,” Mendes notes. “Our culture lends itself to being good performers.”
With Honor Role flourishing and new acting horizons under her belt, Mendes is cruising into her 30s with a steadiness and ease she admits her younger self—the 20-year-old ball of anxiety—could have never imagined. At this point in her life, she knows the quiet strength in harnessing her emotions. “I want my willingness to be vulnerable and show the deepest, most shameful, and ugliest parts of myself through my characters to help others connect to their own feelings,” Mendes explains. If she can do that well, the job she’s devoted her life to doing is done.
For decades, women in Hollywood have been taught to view turning 30 as less of a milestone and more as a warning sign—an invisible countdown ominously looming in the background. The entertainment industry has long treated youth as its most prized commodity, creating the perception that a woman’s relevance, marketability, or appeal is tied to how closely she aligns with an ever-shifting ideal. As a result, many women are made to feel as though they’re constantly being measured against the next generation of talent. (Lest we forget the Substance of it all!)
Hollywood, of course, sells reinvention as the antidote, and nowadays, everyone is buying it. New stylists. New faces. New bodies. Entire career revivals are built around the illusion that, with enough discipline and luck, you can shed your old skin fast enough to remain an object of desire for the public to project their fantasies onto. But Mendes doesn’t seem particularly interested in outrunning herself anymore.
There’s a quiet confidence to the way Mendes speaks about her future, one rooted less in reinvention for reinvention’s sake and more in reclaiming what’s always been there—her artistry, her creativity, or her love for connecting with the most vulnerable parts of herself. The irony, of course, is that Hollywood will probably frame this era of Mendes’s career as a comeback or transformation. Mendes, meanwhile, might simply call it finally becoming herself again.
Photographer: Gleeson Paulino
Creative Direction: Amy Armani
Style Director: Lauren Eggertsen
Hair Stylist: Lauren Palmer-Smith
Makeup Artist: Jen Tioseco
Manicurist: Thuy Nguyen
Entertainment Director: Jessica Baker
Producer: Lindsay Ferro
Producer: Luciana De La Fe
DP: Sam Miron
Video Producer: Kellie Scott
Special Thanks to @blackwidowmustang and @goldlinebar
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