For Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal, Hulu’s La Máquina is less a reunion and more a return to the status quo. And for our communities, seeing the two together on screen feels both comfortable and right. In the lead-up to La Máquina, the streamer’s first Spanish-language original series, which follows an aging boxer (Gael García Bernal) and his manager (Diego Luna) going for one last shot at the title, Remezcla talked to García Bernal and Luna about working together again and making this project in Spanish.
Note: Interview was done in Spanish but translated for this write-up.
“It’s wonderful,” Luna said, about not just working with García Bernal, but the recognition from our communities that this isn’t just a reunion for them, it’s one for us. “It feels great to be part of a community, to have a story in common with the people who have seen the things we have done together.”
And, Luna shared, it’s bigger than just the two of them working together. “It happens to us at all levels. Obviously, it happens to us working together because when we meet as actors, something happens. What we lived when we were working far away, somehow, we bring it to the set.”
“But it also happens to us with the team we work with. These are people we met, the vast majority, more than 20 years ago. And we have been making films and projects together. The cast of the series are also actors with whom we have grown, actors and actresses that we have seen, that represent us, that represent something, that suddenly we have the opportunity to play together, and that has a very beautiful value,” he added. “Because there is history in common, and desire to do new things, and to reach other audiences.”
And Luna and García Bernal made the very conscious decision to do this project, La Máquina, in Spanish. García Bernal explained that decision saying “It’s definitely the language with which one is born, with which one learns to eat, to sleep, to love, to play, that language is your homeland, in a way. And that homeland is recognized constantly, every time you hear it, because there’s also something that Spanish has, which is a very existential language.”
“So, there’s something very beautiful there that allows us to investigate certain things, certain life experiences, certain very specific things, in a very universal way, with that larger philosophical complexity. And it becomes very interesting.”
But it wasn’t just about doing it in Spanish, it was about doing it in Mexico too, García Bernal made it clear.
“We wanted to do this series in Mexico, naturally in Spanish, because obviously, that doesn’t even go into question, there’s no negotiation to be made about it. But we are very lucky and fortunate to have Searchlight and Hulu as allies, who told us, of course, do it with everything, and stretch it and take it to the limit.”
And García Bernal hopes this is just the beginning. “I hope this series, as well as many other cultural experiences that have happened lately, are among the precursors that detonate that there are many more productions in Spanish and that we can do these things… that they reach different parts of the world, that we consume them among ourselves, that we see them among ourselves, but also that we will be able to speak to people who don’t speak our language.”
La Máquina premieres on Hulu on October 9th.
