Go Behind the Scenes of Ana with Ana de la Reguera
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
In the series Ana, Ana de la Reguera plays herself—sort of. “It all started nine years ago when I had a big career in Mexico, and I was working in the U.S., but it was still pretty new,” the actress, who previously appeared in Narcos, Army of the Dead, and Goliath says. “Things weren’t happening the way I wanted, so I decided I needed to make my own show. The characters I was being offered were things I’d done before; I was in my mid-30s and really wanted to evolve. I wanted to tell a story about a woman like me.”
The resulting series—which streaming on VIX and viewable internationally on Prime Video— about a down-on-her-luck actress trying to make her name (and survive life with her family) recently launched its third season, and de la Reguera worked in front of and behind the camera, writing, producing, and directing episodes. “It gave me a lot of freedom to be creative,” she says in an interview completed before the recent SAG-AFTRA strike, “and took away the pressure I put on myself to get other jobs. Those started to come as well, but it took me making this show to get there.”
Here, de la Reguera opens her personal camera roll to T&C to share a behind-the-scenes look at Ana, and the moments that didn’t make it on screen.
“This is a scene where Ana finally gets to do a big U.S. television show. I’m showing the audience how science fiction projects gets made, when everything looks huge but filming it you can feel a bit silly. It’s happened to me, specifically when I made Army of the Dead. I remember seeing the movie for the first time and in my scenes with a [CGI] tiger, I had no idea how big or scary it would be. So, this is a bit of an Easter egg.”
“Alicia is my sister on the show but also my real sister. She’s a musician and she made the music for all three seasons of the series. My sister and I don’t fight; we fought so much as kids, but after I moved to the U.S. as an exchange student when I was 15, I realized how cool she was. She was always way ahead of her time, and I didn’t really understand until I was in my teens. Now we’re very good friends.”
“Veracruz, where I grew up, has a carnival, and so our sixth episode takes place there and it’s like a giant party. This was great because it’s how I see Veracruz: it’s all joy, color, and happiness. It’s just beautiful, and I hope the show makes people want to go and see for themselves. I also directed this, so I’m very proud of this sequence.”
“Music is really important in this show, especially for Carlos Miranda’s character, Papasito. In Veracruz we have music called son jarocho, and his character has decided to combine that traditional music from the region with urban music. So, here we are in Veracruz with the real musicians whose work inspires him.”
“Papasito, my love interest on the show, lives in L.A. and has never been to Mexico. I take him to see the city with me and this market in Coyoacán, Mexico City is one of the first stops we make. I wanted to shoot there because when I first moved to Mexico City, I would come here every Sunday and would eat so much from the market that I’d make myself sick. So, we did the same thing for the series and he was just shocked.”
“This is Tina Romero, an incredible actress who plays my mother. If you know my mom—who makes a quick appearance in our final episode—you’ll see how similar they are. Sometimes they look identical.”
"This is me with Yuri, a huge singer from Veracruz who has the most beautiful voice. She was an icon for us, in part because she had this famous song about a panda in Chapultepec Park—everyone in my generation knows that song. In the second episode of the season, my character is on LSD and during that experience I hear the song and then she appears singing to me. It was amazing to have her on the show, because I just absolutely love her, and I think people who know the song are really going to get it.”
You Might Also Like
