The Queen [of the South] made it to Miami last night.
Alice Braga, who will be playing Teresa Mendoza in the upcoming series, The Queen of the South, showed up to a red carpet at the Regal South Beach Cinema yesterday evening, for the opening night of the Hispanicize Film Showcase. Mendoza is a Mexican woman who is forced to run and seek refuge in America after her drug-dealing boyfriend is murdered in Mexico.
Braga watched the premier of the USA Network series, along some of her cast mates: Veronica Falcon, Justina Machado, Peter Gadiot and Jon Ecker.
“I think it’s beautiful to have a story with so many Latin actors involved,” said Braga, who is Brazilian. “That is something that I think is very important now a days for us to have so many Hispanics who live in the U.S., and just to be part of a show like this is very special.”
The Queen of the South is originally a novel written in Spanish called, “La Reina Del Sur,” written by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. It inspired the Telemundo miniseries, also called La Reina Del Sur, where actress Kate del Castillo played the role of Mendoza, a valiant woman from a poor town in Mexico who falls in love with ‘El Guero,’ a bad boy heartthrob – played by Jon Ecker in The Queen of the South – and slowly follows him, as his girlfriend, into the world of the Mexican drug cartels, where she slowly builds up through trials and tackling obstacles, only to become the most powerful woman of her field.
“The writers decided to do a completely different journey than the book and the telenovela,” said Braga. “The journey that I go through [as Mendoza] is different than the book, so the character has some changes that are different, but I tried to use the core of the book; the woman and the human being that she is. That’s the woman that I tried to portray.”
The screening followed with a panel, where the actors had one-on-one interaction with the audience, answering questions about the series and the depiction of drugs and Latinos in the United States.
The Queen of the South will be airing this Summer on USA Network.
