After a three-year hiatus, HBO’s delightfully weird and unapologetically queer series Los Espookys is finally returning this month — fortunately, it was worth the wait.
The first season of the show introduced audiences to its group of lovable misfits, Úrsula (Cassandra Ciangherotti), Tati (Ana Fabrega), Andrés (Julio Torres), and their intrepid leader Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco). They start a business creating “spooks” that can solve just about every imaginable — and some unimaginable — problem, from your standard “inheritance spook” to saving a tourist town when its beloved owl loses the wig that made it a draw for visitors. Oh, and Tico (Fred Armisen) is the world’s most passionate valet parker.
Listen, the show is strange — wonderfully strange — and also very (wonderfully) queer.
Two of its lead characters, Andres and Úrsula, are LGBTQ+ identified, while Renaldo’s sexuality is more undefined but perhaps falls somewhere in the Ace spectrum, and Tati, well, she defies all categorization — as well as physics and the space-time continuum.
Los Espookys is a celebration of queerness in every sense of the word. This is thanks in no small part to the talent behind the series. Fabrega, who previously wrote for The Chris Gethard Show, Torres, who wrote for Saturday Night Live (“Wells for Sensitive Boys” was one of his skits), and comedy legend Armisen are all working double duty as the show’s creators and stars, and they each bring their own off-kilter sensibilities.
Fabrega and Torres see the way the show approaches queerness as a reflection of their lived experiences, as Torres tells PRIDE. “The show deals with queerness in the way that it does, because that just so happens to be the way that Ana and I live our lives,” he says. “That’s what happens when you get people from different walks of life [telling stories], right? It’s like they make things that resemble their lives in a way that doesn’t advertise them necessarily.”
“There was never any moment of like, ‘how do we want to represent queerness’,” Fabrega tells PRIDE. “It just felt very organic and not like something that we had to calculate.”
That same organic approach comes into play when the two are building the strange and wonderful world where, for instance, Kim Petras can be the Secretary of State, or people can get lost in a cursed mirror dimension as a matter of routine. For Fabrega, it’s all about following the ideas that are fun. “Sometimes people sit down to write, like, ‘what’s the world that this show?’ And we didn’t approach it like that. We just were like, ‘I don’t know. What if this happened? What if that happened? Oh, that’s fun.’ And it just kind of organically develops into this world where anything can happen,” she explains. “So it’s not weird to them if there’s a demon working at the embassy, it’s all like just part of their daily lives”
That sense of total freedom is something that resonates on a personal level for Velasco, whose character Renaldo goes on a deeply personal journey in season two that includes finally reckoning with his sexuality. Playing Renaldo was freeing for the actor. “I find [the freedom to be himself] relieving every time I play Renaldo, that he doesn’t have to pretend he doesn’t have to please anybody around with what he’s doing. He’s just devoted to his passion and to his friends, the people he loves. And he doesn’t have this conflict about what people think about [him],” he tells PRIDE. “Something that Renaldo [taught] me is that we can be proud and we can be really, really comfortable with our dark side, or our weird side... people will love us anyway.”
Ciangherotti was also thrilled to be back in the charmingly sardonic shoes of Úrsula, who finds her political side in season two. It was something that the cast feared might not happen with the show on hiatus during the pandemic. “It was very intense to go back. It was very... like a miracle,” she tells PRIDE. “Because we were there [in Chile] when all the catastrophe started. And then we got to finish it two years after. And it was intense to go back into the same place, the same energy. [To] get back into the skin of the character. But it felt so good to go finish it.”
Fans will be grateful they did, as while it might have been three years, these Espookys haven’t forgotten a trick — or a treat.
Los Espookys season two premieres September 16 on HBO Max. Watch PRIDE’s full interview with the cast below.
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