John Leguizamo on Dear Killer Nannies, Fatherhood and Comedy

This was not easy. This was a big challenge. It seems like white actors all have to play Hamlet to prove themselves. And all Latin actors in America have to play Pablo…Benicio del Toro did it, Javier Bardem did it, and Wagner Moura did it.

I mean, everybody’s done it. So I felt like I got to do it, but I got to do it even better, because why attempt it if you’re going to do the same or less? So I studied the accent really hard. Every piece of footage on Pablo I studied over and over, every recording.

Pablo’s real son was the consultant on the show, and he’s a narrator, and he also gave me tips on how to be the best Pablo as well.

That’s an incredible question because you don’t want to normalize Pablo. You know, that’s not OK. He’s a sociopath. You know, we are fascinated by him because of his story, because here’s this poor kid from Latin America, and the poverty in Latin America when you’re poor is a whole another level.

And to become the richest gangster in the history of the world, when he died, he was worth 30 billion dollars, which is 70 billion today. So your imagination is cooking on it. You’re like, how does he, how does a man become that powerful? You want to see this represented, but you don’t want to idolize him.

You don’t want to normalize him because he was an assassin. Thousands of people died because of him, and he didn’t care. So what we wanted to show was that villains are not black or white, they’re gray.

They can still be warm and charismatic, they can still be loving, and they can still tell somebody to be assassinated, put the order on somebody, put the hit on someone, without compunction, without remorse. We want to make sure you saw the demon he was, but also show that he had a human side.

Even though he could not, behind closed doors, he lived in this paranoid world where, you know, what they tell you as a gangster is: don’t have family, because then you have an Achilles heel.

And that’s what happened to him. He had these two kids, loved them more than anything in the world. And what Sebastián, Pablo’s son, told me was that in Colombia, back in the 80s, Latin fathers did not hug their children, did not kiss them, did not say I love you.

It was tough love. That’s how you raised a “baron”. And he said that Pablo actually hugged them, kissed them in public, said I love you because, you know, he always thought that he was going to die.

He wanted to be as affectionate as possible. And that helped change Colombia’s culture. You know, he showed publicly that this gangster could hug and kiss and say I love you to his son, that that must be the right way of doing things.

Well, I’m a dad, so I can relate to that part. I guess that’s what we all relate to: Pablo Escobar’s family life.

And this dialogue isn’t made up. These are real things that were said. You could tell when you read it. When I first read it, I was like, no, wait a minute. This isn’t made up.

These are lived words. These are words that were expressed. Sebastián, his son, told me that these are real moments and things that were said; you can also feel there’s an authenticity to it.

That’s like nothing I’ve ever read before in terms of a father and son’s complex, difficult relationships.

The whole thing was a challenge. I mean, to get that accent perfect because, you know, every Colombian person is going to be watching me, listening to my accent, trying to catch me tripping on it, sounding too gringo, too Caribbean or whatever.

So I had a coach. I worked on it so hard. I’ve never worked on anything so hard in my life because I didn’t want to mess up. I didn’t want to embarrass anybody.

Well, you know, you have to get that Pablo hair. We had to get the perfect hair, the 70s porn stash and “la panza” (the belly). 

Me dieron la panza también, you know, a little prosthetic to help me, you know. And I started eating a little bit recklessly, too.

You know, it is a difficult role to portray correctly because you don’t want to iconize him. You don’t want to make him an icon.

You want to show how difficult that life is because we don’t shy away from his assassinations, his bombings, the level of cruelty that he put out into the world.

But the show’s beautiful message is that the son, Juanpi, figured out this was not the life for him. He left this world, changed his name, moved out of the country with his mother and became a psychologist.

I guess you would have to be to get out of this system and to make himself a different person, a different kind of lifestyle. He gives speeches around the world about positivity.

It’s incredible what he’s done with his life, and that’s the beauty of this show, that if you want to, you can get out of this life.

Oh wow. I felt that many times, and sometimes I was disappointed.

But if I had to pick one, I guess Carlito’s Way, I thought my career was going to change, you know. It definitely changed me.

The director, Brian De Palma, had just done Casualties of War, the Vietnam War movie with Sean Penn. And then I was doing this second movie with him, and he gave me carte blanche.

You know, that was film then, you got two or three takes. He gave me 30 takes, sometimes even more, in so many scenes. He was so fascinated by what I was doing that it taught me to be fearless on film. It really showed me how to act on film.

Oh, absolutely. I mean, with the way you have to raise children in this modern world and how much attention you have to put into it.

I know Pablo loved his kids, but there’s no doubt that he was a sociopath in his work; he was not that at home. That’s why his son was able to leave the business because he gave him that unconditional love.

Still, at the same time, he lived in paranoia. He had to leave the house and not be with them, so he wasn’t attracting violence to the home and was a decoy.

He was constantly changing places where he lived. His son couldn’t go to a normal school because he could be kidnapped or murdered.

And the kids didn’t want to play with him or talk to him because they were scared of him.

They had to be homeschooled by these trained nannies who were trained to kill to protect their sons. These nannies became their friends, teachers, family, mentors, but they were not family, and at some point, they became informants, some of them.

And Pablo had to kill them. Then how do you explain it to your son that he just killed his nanny? That was a really difficult transgression for his son to overcome.

Yeah, yeah, mid-20s.

Oh yeah, my kids, of course, they tell me what to do and what not to do. I can’t talk about it. There’s a role I just got offered, and my son said, “You have to do it.”

And I was like, I don’t know if I want to do it. “You have to. This will make you so cool to all my friends”, so I’m going to do it.

But I can’t talk about it because I had to sign an NDA.

Well, filming a series is 12 hours a day. People think Hollywood is glamorous. No, you’re working 12 hours a day or longer. It’s really long hours and always away from your family.

So the way I balance it with my family is you can’t work as much. You have to make sure you’re not doing too many movies far away from your house.

I did The Odyssey. I had my family come with me and stay with me for a month in Sicily, and my daughter came with me when we shot in Morocco.

I spent quality time with them…, but when I’m on the shoot, I try not to work as much so I can be home sometimes. You’ve got to be. You have to go home.

Well, mental health is really important.

I just did this play that I wrote called The Other Americans at the Public Theater, and it was all about mental health because in Latin communities, as in Black communities, people are wary of psychology.

The stigma that psychologists are only crazy people. They don’t understand that to take care of your mental health, depression, and suicidal ideation, you need to talk to someone, an expert, to help you deal with these situations.

It’s not that you’re insane or there’s something wrong with you.

No, there’s something right with you for taking care of it. So yeah, I want to normalize going to therapy in the Latin community because there are no other people that need it more than us, with all the things that we deal with in this country and in the world.