HOTEL COCAINE: Yul Vazquez and Danny Pino Dissect Nestor and Román’s Tense Confrontation

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Sunday, July 28 episode of HOTEL COCAINE.]

The truth finally came out on the Sunday, July 28 episode of HOTEL COCAINE: Nestor (Yul Vazquez) learned Román (Danny Pino) was working with the DEA.

Prior to the revelation, Nestor had truly believed his brother was invested in their reunion and newfound partnership. “Nestor is generally somebody who is generally suspicious of most folks,” Vazquez tells Give Me My Remote. “But this is his brother, and I think he deeply want[ed] to trust his brother and this rekindling of their relationship. I think if he didn’t, if he didn’t fully trust his brother, that would not have ended well…[prior to this,] he thinks Román is on the level…he loves his brother, and he wants to believe in his brother.”

But when he learned the truth—from his wife—he confronted a sleeping Román, demanding (at gunpoint) to know whether his wife or his brother had been lying to him.

Filming the scene ”was heavy,” Vazquez acknowledges, noting they filmed it with a few different emotional beats including “it would kill me if it was true that my brother had double-crossed me. And it would have been heartbreaking, and I desperately wanted that to not be true.”

The moment of truth was also something that was complex to film, production-wise. “It was highly technical, because of where the bed was and then where the gun had to be,” Vazquez recalls. “That’s [director] Guillermo [Navarro]’s episode. And Guillermo thinks in these pictures, so the gun had to be in a very particular place, and then Danny had to be in a very particular place, which makes it more sort of by-the-numbers type of thing.” 

“But the one moment where we were able, hopefully, to show something is when I say to him, ‘Either my wife is lying to me or you were lying to me,’” he continues. “And I think [Nestor] would rather that his wife was lying to him than his brother…I think I said to Guillermo, let me try a few things [in how the lines are said]. And I just tried to give him a few different choices to pick in the edit. I never want to tell the audience how they should feel. I want everybody to take away what they feel. I think you have to sort of dial the performances into a way where the character’s point of view is coming through. but I am not beating you over the head saying this is how you should feel.”

Cornered, Román opts to tell his brother the truth about the deal he made with the DEA to protect Valeria (Corina Bradley), Román’s daughter—and ultimately Nestor, as well. “I have four brothers, and I don’t know that they would believe if I tried to lie to them,” Pino says. “I think [out] of anybody in the world—outside of maybe my wife—who would be able to smell bulls—, it would be my brothers, especially after being exposed in that way.”

“At that point, after being exposed, everything sort of falls into place for Nestor,” Pino continues. “He sees how everything falls in [with how Román was playing him]. And once you, once the truth is revealed, once you see the matrix, you can’t unsee it. And I think Román realizes that. He realizes there’s no going back here. There’s really no avenue to further deceive Nestor.”

When Román points out that Nestor’s actions have helped put them in this position, “I think he’s listening to his brother. His brother might have a bit of a point,” Vazquez concedes with a laugh. 

Román is also not in the best place, emotionally and mentally, Pino acknowledges. “Maybe a small part of Román wants [Nestor] to pull the trigger,” he says. “He’s done with this. ‘If you’re gonna do it, go ahead and do it.’ Because I’m done with feeling trapped, right? I feel like Román is at a breaking point, as well, the same way that Nestor is. And I think maybe one of the biggest revelations there is [that] by both of them breaking at the same time they actually get more unified.”

“We’re past the point of no return,” adds Vazquez. “And what is definitely not up for grabs is Fidel [Castro] succeeding on any level here. So we, the brothers, will always be united in that aspect, for sure.”

And things take a turn by the end of the hour, when Valeria is on the verge of being ambushed.

“I think that once Valeria is in the kind of danger that she’s in towards the end of our season, it unlocks the remainder of who Román has been trying to hide from the world,” Pino previews. “He becomes the person he’s been fearing. The person that he left behind on the beaches in Cuba, this sort of trained assassin; that person reveals himself.”

HOTEL COCAINE, Sundays, MGM+

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• HOTEL COCAINE Post-Mortem: Danny Pino on the Death That Marks an Important ‘Turning Point’ in Season 1
• HOTEL COCAINE: Danny Pino Explores the Complexities of Portraying Roman Compte

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