“El humor en México y en Estados Unidos es completamente diferente. Entonces tuve que reinventarme”.

I think a big appeal of the show is that it comes from you, because your crossover success is so rare. Audiences want to see themselves in you.

Absolutely. And I’m so glad that the series is bilingual and it’s getting its third season. For me it’s already a success, because it’s not easy. Especially because it’s a Latin series, but you can watch it even if you are French or German, wherever, it’s a series that anyone in the world can enjoy.

The bilingual part of it is key to me, because we’re seeing more and more of that. Why was it important to have a show that is so genuinely bilingual?

Well, first of all, I wanted to do something for the mainstream, too. I noticed before the pandemic, everything was in English. If you want it to succeed worldwide, it has to be in English. But after the pandemic, people were watching so much material, not just American series. They started watching Money Heist, for example, or Squid Games. Yeah. I feel that after the pandemic, now people are used to reading subtitles. And that’s amazing, because that way you can enjoy other cultures. That’s why Parasite got the Oscar, because it’s a great film. And we got the chance to watch it because we’re open to read subtitles. I feel that before the pandemic, if it was not in English, it was complicated. We wanted to also respect things and be real because sometimes, if you watch a film and they go to China, and everyone in China speaks English, and they go to Mexico and everyone in Mexico speaks English, that’s not true. And I was always struggling and telling the executives, because they want more English, I was like, no, no, no, we need to stick to the reality. If they’re in Mexico, they should speak Spanish. Put some subtitles, but we need to do it the way it should be.

So many of your projects touch on the immigrant experience. Why is that important to you?

That’s a great question. I feel that sometimes Americans don’t understand immigration. Why are people coming to the U.S.? They just feel that our people from Latin America are coming to steal our jobs or to do crime, whatever. And it’s way more than that. We are victims of some governments that have done wrong things in the past. There’s a lot of poverty. There’s a lot of violence. For example, nowadays there’s a lot of crime. The Narcos are really kidnapping people, killing them or recruiting young kids in order to make them become sicarios. So all these people that you see crossing the border, they are really escaping from a very bad reality. A reality where they don’t have freedom, where if they stay, they’re gonna rape their daughters, they’re gonna recruit the kids for the Narcos—they’re literally dying because they don’t have money to eat. So, it’s really important to understand that all these people that finally get to America, they’re looking just for peace, for a better life. And of course, they’re sometimes, one percent, not good people, but 99 percent of those people who cross the border, they want to work and have a peaceful life. They are hardworking people, intelligent people, nice people. So, it’s important for me to tell Americans this story so they could understand why are they crossing the border? It’s not just to steal their jobs, it’s because they really want a better life. And they will do America a better place, I swear.

Obviously, Acapulco is based on one of your characters, but you have a whole career of other characters, from your sketch show Derbez En Cuando to your crazy popular sitcom La Familia P. Luche. Would you ever do an American version of those?

I’ve been trying to. For example, Familia P. Luche is a very dysfunctional family. And I remember the first time I showed that to my agents, they were like, “Oh, don’t show this to anyone, because it’s so broad and different.” They were freaking out. But if you understand that there’s the second layer [to it], it’s an amazing product. I actually told my business partner recently, we should do an English version of Familia P. Luche because it’s so different from anything that you’ve watched before in the U.S. that I think it would be successful. So, I’m working on that right now. I think the success of it would be that it’s so completely different.