If there’s one character most fans of The Rookie loved to hate, it’s Bridget Regan’s Monica Stevens. And it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out why. Among her vile qualities, Monica was extremely manipulative and selfish. She generally made a point not to get involved in any venture where the outcome wouldn’t be in her favor. To get her way most of the time, she resorted to pressure, leverage, and playing on people’s worst instincts. Unsurprisingly, she died the same way she lived: alone.
But as scary as Monica was, there’s a valid argument to be made for the fact that she wasn’t Regan’s smartest villain. That title belongs to Rose Solano, aka Sin Rostro, the character Regan portrayed to devastating effect on Jane the Virgin. Monica is the B-team to Rose’s Varsity for many reasons, including the fact that half the time people didn’t even realize she was in the game until she’d won, gone on vacation, and came back with a new face.
Monica Stevens Was Smart Because She Understood People
For all her faults, especially the shady lawyer part, Monica’s greatest asset was her incredible understanding of what made people tick. If she doesn’t succeed with fear and intimidation, she zeroes in on a person’s desperation, and if that doesn’t work, she’s not above appealing to a character’s ego. Just as long as she gets her way, everything is on the table. That makes her so scary and more grounded than the average villain because people like that actually exist.
Nowhere is this more evident than in Season 5’s “Death Sentence” episode. Wesley Evers (Shawn Ashmore) realizes just how deep he had gone in dealing with the criminal Elijah Stone (Brandon Jay McLaren) and wants out. However, Monica ensured he would find it very difficult by reminding him of everything that he stood to lose, from his reputation to his freedom, if he went ahead with his plans to jump ship. The fear of that kept Wesley in line for a while.
Adding to her menace is the fact that she knows exactly what she is and “owns every choice” she makes. In fact, she understood human nature so well that she knew things would end very badly for her. Yet, she doesn’t cry or beg when the walls eventually start closing in around her. She just got on with it right to the bitter end. Her last words in Season 8, Episode 17, “Dead Ringer,” “Please not the face,” when she realizes her driver is an assassin sent to kill her, were… cold. But viewers got the impression that she maintained some semblance of control.
That incessant need for close control is what Monica’s intelligence depended on. Once she lost it, and people started figuring her out, everything came crashing down. But that’s where Rose thrived. She didn’t need to be in the room to run things.
Rose Solano Played A Longer And More Dangerous Game
The creators of Jane the Virgin trained viewers not to trust anybody, and the character who embodies this more than any other is Rose Solano, aka Sin Rostro. She’s introduced to viewers as this polished, wealthy, even slightly suspicious character. But in reality, she’s just a former lawyer who runs a smuggling empire. Monica was an expert in manipulating people, but Rose is always a rung or two higher on that villain ladder because she mastered the art of manipulating perspectives.
The show thoroughly enabled this act with the fake deaths, face masks that let her impersonate other characters, and secret identities. Half of it sounded and looked absurd on paper, but Regan somehow sold every moment of it. The best example of this is during her disguise as Susanna Barnett (Megan Ketch) in Season 2. The audience thinks Rose is dead, especially because viewers see a body. Naturally, the show goes on until the episode 22 scene where Susanna turns into Rose and tells Luisa (Yara Martinez), “Don’t look so surprised. You know ours is the greatest love story ever told.”
Ultimately, what makes Rose smarter than Monica, though, is patience. For the most part, Monica reacted brilliantly under pressure, but Rose created the pressure in the first place. She spent years building fake identities, manipulating investigations, and emotionally controlling people without exposing herself. Even her relationship with Luisa became part love story, part psychological warfare. Weirdly enough, those scenes make Rose more dangerous because genuine emotion made her harder to predict. Once Monica Stevens started surviving near-impossible situations on The Rookie, she received comparisons to Rose. This says a lot about the once-in-a-generation villain that Rose was.
Bridget Regan’s Greatest Skill Is Making Evil Genius Weirdly Attractive
It’s fair to say that the real reason both characters were so compelling is Bridget Regan herself. She understands how to play intelligent villains without making them feel cold or robotic. The actress really caught the eye of many cinephiles with her incredible portrayal of Kahlan Amnell, aka Mother Confessor, in the fan-favorite epic television series Legend of the Seeker.
For much of the show, she was this goody two-shoes who was part of a protection detail for the seeker. However, most fans of the show agree that the character really came to life in those episodes where she was more or less… evil. Her screen presence was magnified, and she’s since brought that presence to bear on her Rose and Monica characters, despite the tone of both shows being completely different.
Monica feels sharp, polished, and dangerously believable because of the real-world energy in The Rookie. In contrast, Jane the Virgin ran on full soap-opera logic, where somebody can fake their deaths at least three times before lunch. Yet Regan somehow made it work naturally, because she played Monica as a lonely, scrappy woman who was in way too deep. She flawlessly embodied Rose as a sociopath who believed in her own twisted love story.
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