I had no idea they were working on something like “Blue Beetle.” Coming out of the success of a film like “The Joker” and understanding there’s other characters that might have so many things to explore, I wanted to pitch that Bane idea. So they came in and was like, ‘Yeah, that’s a great idea. But we got this product here, and it’s “Blue Beetle.’ ” I knew a little bit about Blue Beetle. I knew that Jaime Reyes was in it. My first reaction was that I didn’t want to brownwash something, you know, that already existed. It’s OK if there’s familiarity with certain things, but I didn’t want to be that person that my Latinidad had to conform to somebody else’s expectations of Latinidad. I wanted to be able to be free, and I wanted the actors that I hired that are Latino to be authentically themselves.
So when I said that, they were like, ‘Oh, no, no, don’t worry. Our writer is Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer. He is a Mexican from Querétaro and just read the script. Let me know what you think.’ And when I read the script, I could see that the person who wrote it not only is Latino, but he wrote characters that he knows and they were so relatable because we’ve realized that even though we’re both from different countries, we’re so similar. Our families are so similar. The music, the TV shows, we grew up exactly the same, just in different countries. And we’re like, ‘Oh my gosh, this is special because not only Mexicans are going to connect. I think all Latinos are going to connect. And consequently, all the people that are not Latino also are going to connect if they’re open and curious.’
Can you talk more about how you and Dunnett-Alcocer settled on the story? I love how you found a way for the women to all be strong figures and also to blend all of these Latino cultures in the film.
We know the tropes, right? We know the hero’s journey, and we all know the superhero genre, how it works. We didn’t want to miss the opportunity (to) tell the story through a different lens. For us, it’s hard to keep a secret from your mother or family because they’re always in your face, always up your nose. And we wanted to like, ‘OK, that’s going to happen, then let’s just keep them in from the beginning.’ They were in the transformation. They’re still going to be their family, and they’re going to bully him because he is a reluctant hero. Not reluctant for a moment, the whole film, he just wants this (scarab) out and then he ends up understanding that that’s his destiny and that could not have happened without his family.