Most people know Cristo Fernández from Ted Lasso. On the Apple TV+, which is now set to return for a fourth season, Fernández played Dani Rojas and became famous for the saying “fútbol is life.” Ironically, the actor and footballer seems to have taken that motto to heart, and earlier this year signed a professional contract with El Paso Locomotive FC.
Right as the World Cup got underway, we talked to Fernández about his journey and his new production company.
“This whole fútbol journey for me has been a bit crazy. All the little things I lived when playing Dani Rojas in Ted Lasso… meeting all my heroes, fulfilling some fútbol dreams, like being in FIFA, playing some friendlies with those heroes. Fútbol came back into my life in so many ways that it just awoke something in me.”
It also came with plenty of questions for Fernández. “Am I really a footballer or not? Who am I? And also running into people who always are kind and let me know how much my work and Dani Rojas and “fútbol is life” has meant to them. But also sometimes they’d ask me: do you play? Do you actually play? And all of that provoked an urgency in me. Like, I believe I can play.”
So, Fernández did what sounds like a movie-worthy thing. He trained in secret, and then he went for it. “I’m just so grateful now to be to have the opportunity to play here at El Paso Locomotive FC making a dream come true and also telling the story that it’s never too late to live your dreams, you know?”
But Fernández is not just content with playing. He’s doing a campaign with Tequila Cazadores, which he shared means a lot to him “being from Jalisco. The campaign, Carded by Cristo, reimagines the game’s yellow and red cards and lets fan take a quiz to figure out what type of fan they are. And he’s also developing a film company with his sister, called Spectrum Films.
In a way I’m putting the filmmaking and the acting on the side, but not completely,” Fernández shared. Indeed, Spectrum is releasing a new movie, No Translation Required, and Fernández hopes that it serves “as a reminder also to all those people with wild dreams.”
This is especially true because, “even with all the opportunities I’ve gotten as an actor, haven’t had a role where I am the protagonist yet. This feature film we’re releasing is the first one.”
“It took me eight years to create a feature film where I can be the protagonist, and it’s a reminder that sports and art have something very similar, which is that they are both very subjective. There can be people who like my acting, and people who don’t. There can be people who like how you play, and others who don’t. You can be amazing, but sometimes even that isn’t enough for a director or a coach to put you on the roster, and it’s not necessarily because you’re good or bad. It’s just taste.”
And sometimes, if there aren’t spaces for our communities, we have to create them. “Something I admire from my heroes is that they are Latinos… from Guadalajara, like Guillermo del Toro, for example, or other Latinos I admire, who understand their role and give opportunities to other people. We want to do that with our films.”