Mexican-Cuban actor Alberto Guerra returns to the small screen with ‘M.I.A.’, a thriller about drug trafficking in the Florida Keys that highlights Latino culture in the U.S. at a time when the community is seeking its own narrative in the face of Hollywood stereotypes.
“We still have to keep fighting for the stories of our culture, our identity and our discourses to be told, regardless of who tells them,” he said in an interview with EFE.
In this new project, available from Thursday on Peacock in the U.S. and Paramount+ in Latin America, and named after the abbreviation of the Miami airport, the actor plays Elias, a violent and ruthless but principled man.
Beyond being attracted by the duality of a character who shows his incongruities between his actions, the project created by the famous Bill Dubuque (‘Ozark’) attracted him because of “the amount of action it was going to have,” he confesses.
“It had been a long time since I had played such a physical character, and I enjoyed it very much,” admits the Cuban interpreter.
Although he did many of the scenes alone, he recognizes that “it was a shared work. I say this is the first character I played but I didn’t actually do it. We did it between JJ Dashnaw, who is the stunt coordinator, and me.”
“We rehearsed a lot, many weeks for each sequence that was done and we had two, three days to shoot it,” he adds.
Alberto Guerra with ‘M.I.A.’: The narco from a female perspective
M.I.A. is presented as “a variant” to the stories that deal with drug trafficking on the Florida coasts, although it starts with the particularity that “it takes a very familiar situation for everyone and adds a new element, which is the life of a teenage girl whose life is practically taken away from her,” explains Guerra.
This character, Etta Tiger, represents the emotional and strategic engine of a complex plot driven by a thirst for revenge.
“She has a lot of love, she is very intelligent, she likes danger, she has elements (associated with male roles). She’s not just a girl, she’s a real woman who can achieve anything she sets her mind to,” Shannon Gisela, the main character, told EFE.
Playing a character with so many edges was also a challenge for the actress, who had to balance the coldness of a strategist who carries the weight of an insurmountable trauma.
“She is seeking revenge and, at the same time, she is carrying guilt for what happened. There are two things fighting within herself, and that was the complicated part because she is fighting with the world, but also internally,” he says.
This internal conflict defines the tone of a series that is offered from a female point of view, an angle rarely explored in the genre of criminal suspense and drug trafficking.
For Shannon, playing Etta was not only an acting exercise, but a statement of intent about the role of women in today’s fiction and one that she hopes will serve as an inspiration for the Latina community in the United States.
“I would like to see more stories like this, I would like to see more because we are dynamic, intelligent women, we are capable of doing whatever we want. I hope the community feels that their dreams are possible,” she said, reported Agencia EFE.
Find out more at ‘QueOnnda.com’.
