Unpacking The Rise Of Queen Of The Souths Jaime Reyes A Conversation With Janet Montgomery

Janet Montgomery on Playing Jaime Reyes in Queen of the South

You watch enough cartel dramas and you start noticing the pattern. The smart people get killed first. The ones who try to outmaneuver the system from the inside are usually eaten alive by it. Janet Montgomery's Jaime Reyes was interesting because she subverted that script in a way that felt earned rather than convenient. I sat down with her recently to talk about how she approached that role, the specific challenges of playing a DEA agent in a world where trust is basically a liability, and what it was like working alongside the kind of performers that Queen of the South routinely attracted. What came out of that conversation was more practical than most promotional interviews tend to be.

Unpacking The Rise Of Queen Of The Souths Jaime Reyes A Conversation With Janet Montgomery

Janet Montgomery didn't approach Jaime Reyes as a conventional hero. She talked about watching early episodes of the show specifically to understand what the world demanded from its characters before she even stepped onto set. Most actors I've worked with rush into their characters too fast. They build a personality and then plug it into whatever situation they're given. Janet worked the opposite direction. "I kept asking myself what Jaime would do if everything went wrong," she told me. "Not the cinematic version of wrong, where there's always a clever solution. The real version where you just have to survive the next five minutes. That became my North Star for the character." This approach showed up in small choices throughout her performance. The way Jaime held her coffee cup differently when she was in her own building versus the cartel-controlled territories. The slight backward lean she adopted in group scenes, as if her body was always assessing exit routes. These aren't the kinds of details you catch on a single viewing but they accumulate into something that feels genuinely lived-in.

One thing Janet mentioned that surprised me was how much prep work went into the DEA procedures. She spent time with consultants who made sure the agents on screen weren't just reciting lines that sounded authoritative. There's a difference between someone who knows what they're talking about and someone who's memorized jargon. The consultants caught things like how Jaime would actually file her reports versus how a scriptwriter might imagine she does it. The transition from law enforcement to the morally gray areas Jaime navigated in later seasons was another area she approached methodically. Rather than treating it as a dramatic arc that required increasingly intense performances, she described it as a series of small compromises. Each one individually rationalizable. Together, they changed who she was. "The scariest part of playing Jaime wasn't the dangerous situations," she said. "It was the moments where she convinced herself she was still the good guy. Those were harder to film because you can't play that as guilt. You have to play it as certainty."

We also talked about the physical demands of the role. Queen of the South filmed in Texas and New Mexico, and the outdoor shooting conditions were rougher than most viewers probably realize. Janet mentioned a particular scene in the second season where they were shooting during a heat wave and she had to deliver a confrontation while running on minimal water breaks. The fatigue you see on screen during some of those later episodes wasn't acting. It was just the actual conditions of production. Another practical challenge she described was working with the show's dialogue. Cartel dramas tend to rely on exposition-heavy scripts because the plots are inherently complicated. Janet developed a technique for handling that without making it feel like information dumping. She'd find the emotional trigger behind each piece of information rather than treating the words themselves as the priority. "If Jaime is explaining why she can't trust someone, I don't play 'explaining.' I play the fear that comes with needing to communicate something important while knowing the person on the other end might use that information against you. The explanation is just the vehicle."

She also had strong opinions about how the show handled the relationship between Jaime and the various cartel figures she encountered. Some actors would have played those scenes as pure antagonism. Janet deliberately introduced moments of genuine respect and even affection into her interactions with certain characters. It made the eventual betrayals hit harder because the audience had been given reasons to believe the connection was real. When I asked about what she learned from working on the show that carried into her subsequent projects, she was straightforward. The discipline of understanding an entire ecosystem before committing to a character. The value of letting physical reality inform emotional choices. And the importance of finding the ordinary moments within extraordinary circumstances. "People remember the shootouts and the drama," she said. "But the scenes that actually stayed with me were the quiet ones. The ones where Jaime is just sitting in a room making a decision that will change everything. That's where the work happens."

For anyone interested in watching Queen of the South with this in mind, I'd suggest paying attention to the scenes between the action sequences. That's where Jaime Reyes becomes something more than a genre archetype. Janet Montgomery built that character layer by layer, and it shows in every frame she appears in.