The Big Picture Ahead of the official launch of the new free streaming service, The Network, Collider's Steve Weintraub sat down with the cast and creator of the streamer's first original series, The Green Veil. The historical thriller stars John Leguizamo in his first-ever starring role for a television series, written specifically with him in mind by producing partner and series showrunner and creator, Aram Rappaport .
JOHN LEGUIZAMO: You know the business. You know how Hollywood works. It's been difficult being a Latin man in the industry in Hollywouldn’t. It's just a fact. There's a lot of talk about doing Latin stories and people-of-color stories, but it's a lot of talk. There's a little more inclusion in terms of our appearance in movies and commercials and TV series, but our stories are still not being told. So, it's hard to get a role of this complexity in the leading role.
JOHN ORTIZ: Well, it just hasn't been told. Living now, I think we can all agree that it's complex, to say the least, and mind-boggling. That old saying of, like, “You gotta look back sometimes to figure shit out now,” holds true, to some extent, and especially if it has to do with historical events. I'm a fan of historical fiction — I'm a fan of history. I'm a fan of the kind of history that wasn't in my history class, which is what this is about.
RAPPAPORT: I have to just to add to that, I was writing this and kicking it to John because I knew John was gonna play this role, and we're going back and forth, and I said, “Who can we bring in to anchor this?” The John Ortiz role, basically. Because you have to be so forthright and trusting and immediate in how you play that, and it was gonna be so important that it wasn't this stereotypical moment for a Latin actor or a Native actor to just be victimized.
LEGUIZAMO: Double identities. Everybody's dealing with double identities. It's so interesting, this character, it's not me, it's very despicable and heinous, but what I loved about this project was, we Latin people have been here forever — at least in 1492 — and when you watch Mad Men and all these period movies, we're totally erased as if we didn't exist.
We can veil this stuff in the proactivity that we're doing, or the initiatives, our inclusion initiatives, but the reality is when we started working with Native advisors, Native people, Latin people, they're still put in this box where filmmakers are like, “You can play a nonfiction character, you can play something that's factual, something that a Latin character would have done, or something that a Native character would have done,” but you can't cast a Native American as a...
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