A Puerto Rican actor flies his teenage daughters to Puerto Rico, shoots a film with Wanda Sykes in her first-ever dramatic role in Undercard, and wraps the project, then immediately starts filming a Yellowstone spin-off in Texas. That's just the last twelve months of Berto Colon's life.

Berto is a working actor you've already seen without knowing his name from shows like The Penguin, Orange Is the New Black, Power Book II: Ghost, The Night Agent. He's the guy who keeps getting called back, now on his third or fourth project with the same production company, and about to appear alongside Michelle Pfeiffer.

In this conversation, Berto breaks down how he actually prepares for a role and it's nothing like what you'd expect. He talks about a specific technique of reading a script multiple times until your subconscious takes over, and why the moments that aren't planned are the ones that make a performance feel real. He opens up about what it meant to film Undercard in Puerto Rico with his daughters on set, the parallel between Wanda Sykes and Mary J. Blige both trying drama for the first time, and what his character Hector is actually after beneath all the gambling and bravado. He also drops that early in his career he was doing motion capture for GTA. His body, Luis Guzmán's face.

For anyone who wants to understand what a real, working actor's career actually looks like from the inside.