HBO show’s Arizona link
‘Los Espookys’ creator, star talks growing up in Arizona
Actress and show co-creator Ana Fabrega talks about the funny, weird HBO horror-comedy show “Los Espookys” and about growing up in Arizona.
“Los Espookys,” an HBO show that defies genre but could probably be forced into the horror-comedy bin if you insist, is really funny and really weird. ❙ And really good. ❙ In fact, one of the reasons it’s so funny is because it’s so weird. The Spanish-language limited series (with English subtitles) follows four people who stage scary events and stunts in the unnamed city in which they live. There’s Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco), a horror-movie fanatic who gets the whole thing
started early in life at a memorably gory quinceañera; Ursula (Cassandra Ciangherotti), a frowning dental assistant; Andres (Juilo Torres), the blue-haired adopted heir to a chocolate fortune; and Tati (Ana Fabrega), Ursula’s sister whose apparent indestructibility comes in handy, since she often has to bear the brunt of some of the events the four put on.
Fabrega, Torres and Fred Armisen created the show. Fabrega, who grew up in Scottsdale, talked recently about the show (in a phone call from France, where she was on vacation, enjoying unusually high temperatures because “I’ve missed that heat wave”), it’s absurdist sense of humor and how Arizona informed her work.
Fabrega has a following from her social-media posts and work on shows like “The Chris Gethard Show.” She’s funny — duh — smart and delightfully self-effacing.
One of the funny things about the show is how you’ll do anything for a laugh, she’s told.
“We seem desperate,” she says. No, no. More like this — the first time we see Tati, who suffers through a series of truly odd odd jobs, she’s manually spinning a fan in an attempt to cool off a priest. But not just spinning it. She also makes little “whoosh”-like fan noises.
“Yeah, just trying to be the whole product,” Fabrega said.
Fabrega graduated from Desert Mountain High School “and never went back,” she said, laughing. She has nothing against Arizona. She just couldn’t find what she wanted here.
“In some ways, I think growing up in a place where I felt accepted in many ways but also felt so different from everybody, and from the kind of stereotypical Scottsdale — we grew up in Scottsdale — I didn’t even realize it until I left Arizona how much I didn’t quite fit in, even though I did,” she said.
“I had good friends and I was very happy growing up there. But once I left and looked back on it, I was like, oh. I never would have found myself the way I did in New York in Arizona, because I was just around the people (in New York) who helped me come into my own.”
New York at first was Fordham University, where she went thinking about studying music and wound up majoring in economics and minoring in business administration. Not exactly the traditional route to comedy, but she worked at it.
“I didn’t start performing until a year after college,” she said. “When I was in high school I was on the improv troupe, and that was my taste of, ‘Oh, I like this.’ But then I was like, this isn’t anything I can actually pursue. And I never felt connected to the theater in school. So I was like, this is just something that’s fun now, and I never thought I would do it again.”
Yet here she is.
Fabrega, Torres and Armisen wrote the pilot; after that, she and Torres wrote the rest.
As for the show’s go-for-broke sensibility, well, that’s basically their sensibility.
“We never really thought much about, ‘Are we pushing it far enough?’ or anything like that,” she said. “It was a very organic writing process. Whatever was funny and interesting to us, we were already thinking, ‘How is this going to resonate to viewers?’ I feel like we kind of write in a box, in our own little world. This is what we like and what makes us laugh, without considering, does it go further than this, or is it too much.”
One of the great things about the show is that within its bizarre set of parameters, nothing really can be too much. Not that they established anything so grand as parameters.
“I feel like we never really thought much about, ‘What is the world, what are the rules of the world?’” Fabrega said. “We would just write whatever was funny to us. And we had a consultant for about a week and a half who was helping us with some story-structure things who was really sort of perplexed by the fact that we weren’t setting rules and following rules.
“For instance, Andres can see his boyfriend through an amulet, and she was like, ‘When are we going to find out more about his powers?’ And we were like, well, he doesn’t have powers. This isn’t like a secret Harry Potter-type of thing. In this world that’s normal, and nobody’s going to call him out on it and say that it’s weird, and he doesn’t have to explain it. It just happens. And I think we built a whole world on that template. Anything can happen, but they’re very grounded and real.”
As funny as the show is, the thought of a consultant pulling out her hair because of the free-form structure of “Los Espookys” might be funnier. But it
in part because of the ambiguity Fabrega and Torres allow to creep in — like Andres’ amulet.
“Yeah, I think there some things that we were like, let’s leave that door open,” Fabrega said. “If we want to cross that bridge we can. But we don’t have to tie ourselves down to it. so there are definitely a lot of open-ended things that we were like, ‘I’ll just explore this later when the time is right.’”
Let’s hope they get that time. The series’ finale will air Friday, July 19. Again, it’s a really good show, but Fabrega said they’ve received no word on a second season yet. Perhaps with her education, she could negotiate.
“Yes,” she said, deadpan. “I will personally handle on behalf of the entire production — me vs. HBO.”
However it turns out, Fabrega is at work on other projects, too, like “AZ Arizona,” an animated show she is pitching.
“It’s about a family in a town that was ruined by a pesticide company,” she said. And while that doesn’t necessarily sound like a laugh riot, if you’ve seen “Los Espookys” you trust her.
“It follows them in this very desolate desert town,” she said. “I think of it kind of like ‘Simpsons’-esque in that you have your four main characters and everything stems from them. But I anticipate it being very open-ended the way that ‘Los Espookys’ is, kind of an anything-can-happen sort of world.”
Here’s hoping it’s one we get to visit.
‘Los Espookys’ 8 p.m. Fridays on HBO.