“Now and Then”: this is the first series of Latin essence of Apple TV + | INTERVIEW

A group of teenagers find their days at a prestigious Miami university interrupted when one of them dies one night. That is the beginning of the script that Ramón Campos and Gema R. Neira wrote for “Now and Then”the new bet of AppleTV+. The Spanish writers marked that day as the most terrible in the lives of the characters and to compose the puzzle of this thriller they called a Latin cast. Although many may see the story as a reflection of Hispanic society in the United States, for the Puerto Rican-American lead actress, Rosie Perez, it is not about that.

In a press conference organized by Apple TV +, regarding the premiere of the series on May 20, the actress and activist for the rights of the Latino community assured that “the brilliant thing” about “Now and Then” is that the plot of immigration is not the focus of the creators. “It has nothing to do with nationality, but with a group of human beings who made a bad decision, were not able to shake it off, and it affected their lives for 20 years. You can put any nationality into the story. The fact that they chose us as Latinos, yei! (sarcasm) Do you know why they do it? Because they know that we are a force to be reckoned with and that they have to pay attention to us. And the public needs to take care of us, just like they have taken care of most white communities,” the actress told Skip Intro.

“How many more stories need to be shown when it comes to diversity within the Latino diaspora? There should be many more! There are a lot of us, there are many Latin countries. In America, we are the number one consumer in the world of entertainment and are disrespected because we often don’t see ourselves as we should on the television screen, in the movies, and on the stage. And when they portray us, they betray us, because they only see us as one thing. It is as if everyone is trapped in a negative stereotype. It’s infuriating,” says the actress.

Perez plays a Miami police officer, Flora Neruda, the city where she finds a case and becomes obsessed with it when she notices the similarity between an event from her past and the death of a young man. In her scenes, she is accompanied by Slovenian Hollywood actor Željko Ivanek, known for his role in the crime TV series “Damages” (2007-2012). Together, at the beginning of the story, they search for the person responsible for a crime in which a Latino teenager dies in a car accident.

In the subtext of “Now and Then”, the immigrant is just another US citizen, this is noticeable because the treatment of the story is not abrupt and victimizing when showing the Hispanic community. In addition, the main location of the series comes from the caricature of sunny and happy Miami and then shows ordinary characters, in some cases, successful and incoherent, as the human being himself is. To reach that realism, the creator and showrunner Ramón Campos (Spain), asked the Apple team to take a walk through the city. During the process of researching and scouting locations, part of the crew and director Gideon Raff (“The Spy”) passed through the poorest, wealthiest and least touristy neighborhoods in the city.

“We went to Miami during the pandemic, when we couldn’t be anywhere and the hotels were almost empty. We didn’t want to see the Miami we knew; those two streets and three nightclubs that draw attention, but people don’t live there. We were lucky enough to go to the house of an Apple executive to see how the top executives lived, where they went. We would ask what school their children went to and we would go to the school to see what it was like”, says Campos to Skip Intro.

“I think that, prior to the story, the personal experience that Ramón (Campos) and Teresa (Fernández Valdés, showrunner) had of trips to Miami had been less profound. (That is to say), it was a business city, normal lives, normal families walking on a beach, so the surprise was to think that, if I am not living this live, how can it be that this is not reflected in a series ”, adds Gema R. Neira, screenwriter of “Now and Then”.

An anecdote from that reconnaissance tour of the city was seeing up close the house of the fictional character Dexter, who bears the same name as the title of the television program broadcast on the Showtime channel between 2006 and 2013. The quickest reaction was to take a photo, but they ultimately decided to shoot part of the Apple TV+ series in a building across the street from that location. Well, finally, everyone had fun filming.

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