Earlier this year it was announced that Michael Peña and Diego Luna were joining the cast of the popular Netflix drama Narcos, but there’d been little movement beyond that. Well, the streaming service has revealed our first glimpse at footage of Luna as Mexican drug kingpin Felix Gallardo and it looks to be a wholly different world than the three seasons we’ve seen.
With a tagline declaring this is a “New country. New cartel. New rules,” Narcos: Mexico charts the rise of the Guadalajara cartel starting in the 1980s. The trailer doesn’t give much indication of what the world looks like specifically, but we do see well-dressed women and Luna in some flashy ’80s-esque suits. The brunt of the 55-second trailer is emphasizing Luna’s Gallardo is “here to build an empire” and that looks to include a lot of guns, explosions, and something untoward with jumper cables. The trailer skews heavily towards Luna’s Gallardo, the “boss of bosses” with Peña, playing DEA agent Kiki Camarena, popping up in two wordless scenes at the beginning and the end. There’s no doubt that the two’s stories will be evenly balanced, but the marketing definitely wants to sell us on Luna. Punctuated with sound effect cues timed to the splitting of the screen, this incarnation of Narcos definitely looks like a polished world of artifice, meant to hide the deeper, darker events bubbling underneath.
Compared to the previous three seasons, Narcos: Mexico is telling a self-contained story. It’s unclear if this will be a standalone season or not, but it seems to imply a new direction for the series. Luna and Peña are fantastic actors and should fit nicely into the shoes once worn by previous Narcos stars Pedro Pascal and Wagner Moura.
Narcos: Mexico drops on Netflix November 16, 2018.