The 45-year-old Mexican actor, director and producer will star in the indie thriller Eleven Days opposite Taylor Kitsch from Concussion director Peter Landesman.
The film is set in the sweltering heat of a Texas summer in 1974, when ruthless prisoner Federico Carrasco (Luna) plays a deadly game against Jim Estelle (Kitsch), head of the Texas Department of Corrections, after taking over Huntsville Penitentiary and holding dozens hostage when his pre-planned escape goes awry. Lines between captor and captive, and justice and survival, begin to blur as the siege spirals for 11 endless, terrifying days.
The screenplay is written by Kevin Sheridan with revisions by Landesman, based on the book Eleven Days In Hell: The 1974 Carrasco Prison Siege at Huntsville,Texas by William T. Harper.
The film, which will shoot in Texas in September, is produced by Vincent Newman and Vance Howard.
Luna has already had himself quite a year following the second season of the Disney+ series Andor.
Luna also received Golden Globe and Gotham TV Award nominations for his role in Hulu’s first Spanish-language limited series La Máquina, where he plays the self-destructive manager of an aging boxer. He stars alongside longtime collaborator Gael García Bernal, and the pair produced the series through their company La Corriente del Golfo, which they founded in 2018 to tell global stories across film, TV, theater and audio.
Up next, Luna stars opposite Jennifer Lopez in Bill Condon’s adaptation of Kiss of the Spider Woman, a Sundance Film Festival standout set for release by Lionsgate on October 10.
Luna was introduced to worldwide audiences with his starring role in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 award-winning road epic Y Tu Mama Tambien, alongside García Bernal.
Diego Luna is speaking out against U.S. President Donald Trump’s immigration policies.
On his first night as a guest-host of Jimmy Kimmel Live on Monday, June 23, the 45-year-old Mexican actor, director and producer delivered a powerful monologue on the importance of immigrants amid Trump’s “authoritarian policies.”
“I come from a galaxy far, far away, called México,” the Andor star said in his monologue.
In Kimmel’s absence, Luna will host the ABC late-night talk show for the whole week, saying it was one of his dreams to do so.
Luna touched on deportations in his monologue, noting, “English is not my first language. So, I hope you guys will help me if I get… What’s the word? Deported!”
The Mexican actor joked that Kimmel “was very smart to hand his show over to me just as Trump decided to go crazy and drop his bombs over the weekend. Thanks a lot Jimmy. Good luck!”
Luna got serious momentarily and said he wanted to address the issue affecting Los Angeles and the United States, “around immigration and the authoritarian policies of Donald Trump.”
“It is no small thing that a Mexican is hosting such an important show,” Luna said. “It’s a big deal and I really hope not to f**k it up.”
Luna recalled visiting the U.S. for the first time at the age of 20 following the success of Y Tú Mamá También and traveling to California for work, making L.A. a city he visited frequently.
“I spent great part of my earnings on laundry services and alcohol here. A lot of my brain cells died in this city,” he joked. “I met people that to this day are very close to my heart. Great things happened to me here. In fact, my son was born here. Yes, I have an Angeleno son. The only Mexican-American of the family, and I’ll always be grateful to Los Angeles for that and every Angeleno.”
Luna talked about how L.A. felt like home when he was away from home and took a jab at Elon Musk saying people liked to show off their Tesla’s before its founder “became a MAGA space Nazi.”
The actor said the community he found in L.A. that what holds all of us together are “our common roots. The people that lifted me up were mostly people that had left their countries to find a new life or the songs and daughters of immigrants that had come here in order to work and build a healthy enjoyable and dignified life away from their place of origin. A moment of that scale is not natural. Nobody leaves their land unless their survival depends on it.”
“All the people that I met share an unspoken gratitude to this country,” he continued. “A country that opened its doors to them. And the most beautiful thing of all is that all these immigrants brought their stories with them. They brought their loyalties, their love, their traditions, always with the openness to adopt new ones, to grow, and to complement each other in this vast cultural exchange.”
Luna noted that what makes L.A. great is people coming together “from different cultures and realities” agreeing “to give each other a chance and build something remarkable together,” adding, “This place is a powerful example of what’s possible of what can be achieved when we put empathy first.”
“I have never been able to fully understand how it is that someone like Donald Trump is able to acquire this level of power,” he said. “I always struggle to understand how his hate speech can take root in a country whose nature has always been a welcoming one. Today many people feel persecuted far too many people live in fear of taking their kids to school or going to places where they earn an honest living.”
He continued, “These people, they’re you’re neighbors, your friends, immigrants. This is very unfair. The multiple times that this country has had to rebuild itself, immigrants were always there to pick up the slack.”
Luna recalled the L.A. fires and how immigrant workers risked their lives to put the flames out.
“There are a lot of lies flying around about immigrants,” he added. “But I’m sure you have more than one story that can attest to the contrary. Today, they need to know that they’re not alone. These have been a dark few weeks. It is not acceptable, nor is it normal to separate families. Violence and terror are not OK. Immigrants need to know that their struggle is yours. Politicians have been dozing on this problem because it’s easier than acknowledging it, because this country benefits from the work of immigrants but refuses to recognize their importance. That is what needs to change. It’s about acknowledging the work of millions and how unfair it is that they have to live in hiding. The only solution is clear now, and it’s been clear for decades. Give them a path to legal certainty.”
Luna made a call for everyone to call their Congress representatives and support organizations that help immigrants in need.
“I hope what I said inspires you to get involved or look at this from a different point of view. If my comments have angered you, I just want you to know it was all written by Guillermo. Blame him,” Luna joke, ending his monologue on a light note.
Alfonso Cuarón is being recognized for his stellar career…
The 62-year-old Mexican filmmaker, known for award-winning films Gravity and Roma, will receive the 2024 Locarno Film Festival‘s Lifetime Achievement Award.
The five-time Oscar winner will receive the award on Sunday, August 11 in Piazza Grande.
That same day, the audience will have an opportunity to meet the Mexican filmmaker in a panel conversation at Forum Spazio Cinema.
The Locarno tribute will be accompanied by the screening of Alain Tanner’s Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000, which was personally selected by Cuarón.
Before the screening of Tanner’s film, Cuarón will discuss its significance both for his own work and film history in general. The conversation will be moderated by Frédéric Maire, director of Cinémathèque Suisse, and is organized in collaboration with Les Films du Camélia.
Cuarón is best known for movies including Y Tu Mamá También (2001), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004), Children of Men (2006), Gravity (2013) and Roma (2018).
Giona A. Nazzaro, Artistic Director of the festival, said: “Alfonso Cuarón is a visionary author of agile and liberated imaginaries. Combining an experimental spirit with the sweep of great popular writers, he has managed to capture the imagination and hearts of millions of viewers, passing on the same wonder that he himself experienced as a child and teenager basking in the glow of classic Mexican cinema. From coming-of-age novels to science fiction, from melodrama to grand sagas like Harry Potter, Alfonso Cuarón has reinvented himself as an artist with each new film, always in the service of the pleasure of cinema, and has thus created a truly multifaceted body of work.”
Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal are bringing the boys south of the border…
The 43-year-old Mexican actor, director and producer and the 44-year-old Mexican Golden Globe-winning actor and producer will executive produce and possibly appear in acting roles in The Boys: Mexico, a new series offshoot of The Boys from Blue Beetle writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer.
Details regarding the premise of the series are being kept under wraps.
A search is currently underway for a co-showrunner to join creator, writer and executive producer Dunnet-Alcocer, who is now working on the script.
The team behind The Boys: Mexico, which will be shot in the Latin American country, is working on budgets for the new series and they have yet to begin casting, sources said.
The Mexico-set offshoot comes from the main creative auspices behind the other series in The Boys franchise, the mothership’s developer Eric Kripke and his Kripke Enterprises, Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg’s Point Grey Pictures, Neil H. Moritz’s Original Film, Sony Pictures Television and Amazon MGM Studios. Loreli Alba is expected to oversee for Point Grey.
The Boys, based on the New York Times best-selling comic by Garth Ennis and Darick Robertson, shares a fun and irreverent take on what happens when superheroes—who are as popular as celebrities, as influential as politicians, and as revered as gods—abuse their superpowers rather than use them for good. Intent on stopping the corrupt superheroes, The Boys, a group of vigilantes, continue their heroic quest to expose the truth about The Seven and Vought—the multibillion-dollar conglomerate that manages the superheroes and covers up their dirty secrets. It’s the seemingly powerless against the super-powerful.
Following the breakout success of The Boys, which is headed to Season 4, two spinoff series were released in 2023: the animated The Boys Presents: Diabolical, which premiered in March, and the college-set spinoff Gen V, which recently concluded its first season and has been renewed for Season 2.
The Boys: Mexico is the latest project hailing from rising star Dunnet-Alcocer, who penned the screenplay for the Warner Bros. Pictures/DC Studios superhero feature film, Blue Beetle. Most recently, he wrote the screenplay for Sony’s El Muertofrom director Jonás Cuarón. The Queretaro, Mexico native also wrote and executive produced Miss Balain 2019. Additionally, Dunnet-Alcocer is attached as screenwriter of the Universal Pictures’ reimagination of Scarface.
Luna and García Bernal are veteran actors whose careers exploded following their collaboration in the hit 2001 Spanish-language feature Y Tu Mamá También directed by Alfonso Cuarón. They have reunited multiple times since then including in Rudo y Cursi (2008) and Casa de Mi Padre(2012).
Most recently Luna joined the Star Wars universe in the Disney+ TV seriesAndor, a prequel to Star Wars: Rogue One.
García Bernal most recently starred in the Amazon bio-drama Cassandro portraying the titular gay wrestler born Saúl Armendáriz.
The longtime friends and collaborators became producing partners in 2018 under their La Corriente del Golfo banner. Recent projects they produced include the aforementioned Cassandro and the series Pan y Circo hosted by Luna, both for Amazon.
U.S. Congressman Joaquin Castro is working to get more Latino films preserved…
The 48-year-old Mexican American politician, who has represented Texas’s 20th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives since 2013, has teamed up with members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus to launch a nationwide call for Latino films to nominate for the National Film Registry.
The U.S.’s preeminent archive of films with cultural, historic or aesthetic significance is essential in preserving cinema. Every year, the Librarian of Congress adds 25 new movies to the registry after reviewing titles nominated by the public and conferring with National Film Preservation Board members and Library film curators.
As of 2023, there are 24 Latino films on the National Film Registry, less than three percent of the 850 movies in the registry.
“Since the earliest days of cinema, Latino actors, writers, directors, and creatives have made extraordinary contributions to American filmmaking,” said Congressman Castro. “As the Library of Congress works to preserve the films that shaped American culture, public nominations will put a spotlight on the Latino-driven films that have sold out theaters and defined generations. As we launch this year’s push for inclusion, I look forward to hearing from folks across America about the Latino films that have made an enduring impact on their lives.”
Most recently, the NFR added: “Cyrano de Bergerac” (1950), starring Puerto Rican actor José Ferrer, the first Latino ever to win an acting Oscar, and “The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez” (1982) with Edward James Olmos. Other notable inclusions are “West Side Story” (1961), “La Bamba” (1987), “Selena” (1997) and “Real Women Have Curves” (2002).
To be eligible, films must be at least 10 years old. To qualify for nominations to the Library of Congress, submissions must be received by August 3.
Some titles the Library of Congress might consider include Guillermo del Toro’s adult-fantasy drama Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), Peter Sollet’s independent New York film Raising Victor Vargas (2002) and Alfonso Cuarón’s coming-of-age masterpiece Y tu mamá también (2002).
The 44-year-old Mexican Golden Globe-winning actor/director will star opposite Nicole Kidman and Matthew Macfadyen in the Hitchcockian thriller Holland, Michigan.
From Prime Video, the film will be directed by Mimi Cave.
While Holland, Michigan is said to concern secrets that lurk beneath a Midwestern town, specifics as to the plot of the film scripted by Andrew Sodroski are under wraps.
Blossom Films’ Kidman and Per Saari are producing alongside Pacific View Management & Productions’ Peter Dealbert, and Churchill Films’ Kate Churchill.
The film will stream in more than 240 countries and territories worldwide.
Garcia Bernal is known for his performances in the films Bad Education,The Motorcycle Diaries, Amores perros, Y tu mamá también, Babel, Coco and Old.
He won a Golden Globe for his role as Rodrigo de Souza in the series Mozart in the Jungle.
The 51-year-old Spanish actress has been cast in Apple Studios’ Raymond and Rayalongside Oscar nominee Sophie Okonedo.
Verdu and Okonedo join a cast that includes Ewan McGregor and Ethan Hawke.
The Rodrigo García-directed and written feature, which is currently filming in Virginia, follows half-brothers Raymond (McGregor) and Ray (Hawke) who have lived in the shadow of a terrible father. Somehow, they still each have a sense of humor, and his funeral is a chance for them to reinvent themselves. There’s anger, there’s pain, there’s folly, there might be love, and there’s definitely grave-digging.
Verdú will star as Lucia, a partner and caretaker to Raymond and Ray’s father. Her character is described as one having the innate strength and alluring personality that will mend the broken family in the wake of the father’s death.
Verdú , an 11-time Goya Award nominee and two-time winner, starred in Y tu mamá también and Pan’s Labyrinth.
Raymond and Ray is produced by Oscar winner Alfonso Cuarón, Bonnie Curtis and Julie Lynn, who’ll produce through their Mockingbird Pictures.
Diego Luna is being celebrated for his platinum career.
This year’s seventh edition of the Ibero-American Platino Awards (Premios Platinos) will honor the 41-year-old Mexican actor, director, producer and festival organizer with the Platino Award of Honor.
An itinerant award show by design, this year’s Platinos will be held on October 3 in Madrid.
Luna will be the youngest recipient of the career achievement honor, joining previous winners Miguel Rafael Martos Sánchez, often simply referred to as Raphael, one of Spain’s most iconic entertainers of the 20th century; Adriana Barraza, the Oscar nominated Spanish-English-language crossover star of Alejandro Iñárritu’s Babel and Amores Perros; Oscar and three time Primetime Emmy nominee Edward James Olmos (Stand and Deliver); Oscar nominee Antonio Banderas (Pain and Glory); and Primetime Emmy (The Burning Season) and BAFTA (“Dona Flor e Seus Dois Maridos) nominee Sonia Braga.
A child actor who excelled from an early age, Luna’s first film appearance was in Javier Bourges’ 1991 Mexican Academy Award-nominated short The Last New Year.” He appeared in several telenovelas throughout the ‘90s, joined on screen for the first time by his longtime collaborator and close friend Gael García Bernal in El abuelo y yo in 1992. Alternating between film and television over the next decade, his international breakout came with García Bernal and Spain’s Marbel Verdú in Alfonso Cuarón’s seminal coming-of-age road trip film “Y Tu Mamá También.”
Shortly after, Luna began his Hollywood career appearing alongside Bon Jovi in John Carpenter’s Vampires: Los Muertos and in Salma Hayek’s Oscar-winning biopic Frida.
In the decades since, Luna has continued to work on both Latin American and U.S. productions while also taking turns as a producer, writer and director. He also, again with García Bernal, launched the nomadic documentary film festival Ambulante, as well as their own production label, first Canana in 2005 and now La Corriente del Golfo.
Most recently, he created and hosts the Amazon Original conversation series Pan y Circo and is starring in the Disney+’s Andor, a spinoff series following his Rogue One: A Star Wars Story character Cassian Andor.
He was also recently confirmed as a voice actor for Netflix’s upcoming animated series Maya and the Three, where he will team with frequent collaborator Jorge Gutierrez (The Book of Life).
Last year’s ceremony was, like so many, forced online by the COVID-19 pandemic. But this time around, the Platinos are planning an in-person event to celebrate the best offerings from the Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American screen industries.
At 11 nominations each, the two standout titles are Fernando Trueba’s Colombian drama Memories of My Father and Jayro Bustamante’s Guatemalan thriller La Llorona.
The Platino Awards are promoted by EGEDA (Spain’s Entity for the Rights Management of Audiovisual Producers) and FIPCA (the Ibero-American Federation of Film and Audiovisual Producers) and have the support of the Ibero-American film academies and institutes as well as numerous sponsors in Europe and Latin America.
The 56-year-old Puerto Rican Oscar-nominated actress and activist has been cast in Apple TV+’s bilingual thriller Now and Then, a drama series that’ll be shot in Spanish and English.
In addition to Perez, who most recently appeared in The Flight Attendant andBirds of Prey, the stellar ensemble cast also includes Marina de Tavira (Roma), José María Yazpik (Narcos: Mexico), Maribel Verdú (Y tu mamá también, Pan’s Labyrinth), Manolo Cardona (Who Killed Sara?), Soledad Villamil (The Secret in their Eyes) and Željko Ivanek.
The series that hails from Bambú Producciones and creators Ramón Campos, Teresa Fernández-Valdés and Gema R. Neira, the team behind the Spanish series Velvet, Cable Girls and Gran Hotel. Gideon Raff will executive produce and direct the first two episodes.
Set in Miami, Now and Then explores the differences between youthful aspirations and the reality of adulthood, when the lives of a group of college best friends are forever changed after a celebratory weekend ends up with one of them dead. Now, 20 years later, the remaining five are reluctantly reunited by a threat that puts their seemingly perfect worlds at risk.
De Tavira will play Ana, a smart and ambitious woman who put her political career on hold to support her husband’s.
Perez is Flora, a talented detective obsessed with an unresolved case from 20 years ago, who will stop at nothing to discover the truth.
Yazpik portrays Pedro, a complex politician married to Ana, he feels entangled in a life that doesn’t belong to him.
Verdu plays Sofia, a strong self-made lawyer who’s life took an unexpected turn 20 years ago and is now hiding too many secrets.
Cardona portrays Marcos, a passionate surgeon who sacrificed his dreams for his family and friends.
Villamil is Daniela, an introspective artist who constantly struggles to overcome a traumatic event from her past.
Ivanek plays Sullivan, seasoned detective who keeps his partner Flora from getting into too much trouble, always operates based on evidence and logic.
The series will be written by Neira and Campos with their team. Campos and Fernández-Valdés will serve as showrunners. Bambú Producciones will produce for Apple TV+.
The 50-year-old Spanish actress will star in Warner Bros.’ The Flash film.
Verdú, best known for her roles in Y Tu Mama Tambien and Pan’s Labyrinth, will portray Barry Allen’s mother in the upcoming Warner Bros. DC standalone movie.
Billy Crudup, due to a schedule conflict on the second season of Apple’s The Morning Show, won’t be reprising his role as Flash’s father.
Ezra Miller will be playing Allen/The Flash again. Cameras will roll in the spring to summer in London.
Andy Muschietti is directing off a screenplay written by Christina Hodson.
While the plot is under wraps, The Flashreportedly involves alternate dimensions with Allen trying to save his mother from being murdered. Also making cameos are alternate dimension Batmans, Michael Keaton from the 1980s Warner Bros. films and Ben Affleck from the millennium ones.
The film is set in the sweltering heat of a Texas summer in 1974, when ruthless prisoner Federico Carrasco (Luna) plays a deadly game against Jim Estelle (Kitsch), head of the Texas Department of Corrections, after taking over Huntsville Penitentiary and holding dozens hostage when his pre-planned escape goes awry. Lines between captor and captive, and justice and survival, begin to blur as the siege spirals for 11 endless, terrifying days.
