In preparation for sitting down with you, I got to look a little bit more into your story, and I was really taken by the resilience that is very clearly a part of your journey.
Thank you. Thank you, I appreciate it.
[Raised by] a single mom, a career interrupted by a car crash — those are not for the faint of heart at all.
Listen, as you mention those things, it seems just a part of the journey now. [It] no longer feels like an obstacle. The beautiful part of everything that you’re saying … Yeah, it was tough; [that’s] not to take away how tough it was. But the idea of the way I look at it now, it’s beautiful. I definitely appreciate those words.
Speaking about the film — with diversity at the forefront of it, it’s such an important story given the political and social time that we’re finding ourselves in. From the director’s note, he mentioned that horror in this category has been used as a metaphor to reflect the reality that so many people in the Latinx community are facing. With that in mind, in what ways did you source inspiration from your own experiences when you were embodying your character of Big Mac?
Well, it’s one of those things you don’t have to look far to find. Emotional reference is needed to give a character such as Big Mac or the characters involved in [the film] a particular story, as people live it every day. Friends, family, people that you even work with are dealing with these immigration issues.
I love being an actor and [having] the opportunity to take this tough subject like immigrants [and] put a face to it. A lot of times, we speak of immigrants in that way where it sounds more like a thing than a person or a human being that you’re talking about. With these stories, we’re able to put human faces and stories along with the word “immigration” that I feel will begin to weigh on people’s hearts in dealing with a lot of immigration issues. My personal belief [is] that it’s viewed more as a thing, [but] you’re actually dealing with human beings.
Definitely. In the headlines, in the political conversations, issues like immigration get so big. There’s an umbrella that covers such a human issue that we forget that every person has a story that has motivated them to do something like that — to pick up their lives and seek something new and hopefully better. We forget that story.
Human rights get blurred. That’s the problem. It’s something that we definitely speak about in an entertaining way, though. That’s the thing. This movie is one of those, [not] a documentary, no.
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