Pictures/™ & © DC Comics.For 30 years and more, whenever the American actor Ralph Macchio attends a sports event, the chances are that a live image of his face will flash up on the arena’s big screen. Main image: Blue Beetle director Ángel Manuel Soto and star Xolo Maridueña on set. “You just reinforced the reason why I want to do this.”īlue Beetle arrives in theaters August 18, from Warner Bros. I could care less about anything else,” Soto adds. “We gave everything to make something special and emotional that connects with audiences, and what you just shared is probably the best compliment I can get,” he says. Soto didn’t have unlimited resources to make Blue Beetle, but his indie filmmaking experience helped him stretch a dollar, and ground the fantastic elements of the film in reality. “I want people to understand that if you have your parents, just hug them, because you never know when it’s the last time.” “Jaime didn’t have a chance to say goodbye to his father,” he says. In that moment, Jaime makes a leap of faith. “I remember thinking it felt ethereal for Jaime to see his father, but it was just his soul. “Damián Alcázar, the actor who plays my father, was so generous and wise and calm,” he says. Maridueña calls the scene his favorite part of the movie. “But your reaction was exactly what we were trying to achieve.” And just imagining it, it’s heartbreaking for me,” he says. I have not gone through the hardship that you went through, I can only imagine. “I didn’t want them to feel like I was there to paint my version of Baltimore,” he told MovieMaker in 2020. Photo by Hopper Stone/SMPSP.įor Charm City Kings, which was released on Warner’s HBO Max in 2020, Soto spent seven weeks in Baltimore before shooting - and learned about the city from locals. Blue Beetle director Ángel Manuel Soto and star Belissa Escobedo on set. His first feature film, La Granja (The Farm), was a low-budget indie shot entirely on handheld cameras that followed a boxer, a midwife and a kid with a bike as they reckoned with economic collapse in Puerto Rico. He carved out a career for himself making documentaries and features, and became known for immersing himself in his subjects, hoping to bring the best representation of his research to the screen. At 19, he studied architecture and advertising because there wasn’t a film school in Puerto Rico, where he was born and raised. Soto built his career on finding the brilliance in others. Even his personality and the charisma and the honesty, the innocence, all that stuff that plays into the character of Jaime Reyes, Xolo embodies it.”īut in some ways, Blue Beetle is the future: It is the first standalone story of the new DC era. “It almost feels like the comic is inspired by him. “I was like, ‘Holy s-, this is Xolo,’” Soto says. They acted alike too - everything from the way Jaime Reyes talked, to his relationship with his family. Soto remembers thinking as he read Reyes’ adventures: “Oh my gosh, he looks so much like Xolo.” The character soon became the property of DC Comics, which in 2007 introduced a teenage version named Jaime Reyes - the third Blue Beetle. The “Blue Beetle” concept goes back to 1939, when Blue Beetle was a staple of the now-defunct Fox Comics and starred in his own radio serial. asked Soto to direct Blue Beetle based in part on his success with Charm City Kings, he began reading some of the superhero’s biggest stories. “He can be funny and quirky and then he gets self-aware that he’s quirky and then he gets serious again.” He’s eloquent, but he’s also a kid that lives in his age,” says Soto.
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