HOTEL COCAINE’s Danny Pino and Yul Vazquez on the Season 1 Finale Cliffhanger: ‘My Jaw Dropped’

[Warning: This post contains spoilers for the Sunday, August 4 season finale of HOTEL COCAINE.]

HOTEL COCAINE ended its first season with one final (major) curveball for Román Compte (Danny Pino): His long-presumed dead wife, Estela, is alive.

“I remember having a conversation with [showrunner] Chris Brancato on set…and he said, ‘You know, I have this great idea,’” Pino recalls to Give Me My Remote. “And I was like, ‘What is that?’ And he said, ‘I think this is where I wanted it to go from day one, but I didn’t share it with you, but here it is.’ And when he said that, my jaw dropped.” 

“I had taken it to be [fact]: The sky is blue, water is wet, and your wife is dead,” he continues. “I never even questioned it. And so when he said that, it started that logical brain [process]: How could that possibly be the case? How could she not have gotten in contact? What situation is she in? Is she in danger? Because that [Cuban] communist dictatorship doesn’t deal well with dissidents, historically. I mean, there’s still political prisoners on the island. And so all of these, the ramifications of that. Was she involved with the regime the whole time? How could she not reach out to her own daughter?”

Pino started posing these questions to Brancato “immediately.” “It was like, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute,’” he says. “I started connecting the dots, almost in the same way that Román would be [doing]. But also his relief that she’s still with us, that she’s still around, and his need to go get her.” 

Of course, the news came at the most disruptive time: Román had just proposed to Marisol (Tania Watson)…and Román only learned about Estela’s fate because the CIA—and his brother, Nestor (Yul Vazquez)—wanted to propose a partnership.

“I think it’s revealed, obviously intentionally, to be this big cliffhanger at the end of our season,” Pino notes. “But our show, a lot of people, at first blush, will say it’s about violence and hedonism and narcotics, but I think, at its very base, our show is about family. And adjacent to family is power, right? And who has the power? Who wants the power, who’s trying to maintain it, who’s losing power? And in that scene, it encapsulates both family and power at the same time.”

“That final scene, it’s Sam Robards, who’s playing [CIA agent] Hal, who drops that piece of intelligence, almost like the move of a queen on a chessboard,” Pino continues. “It is almost like a checkmate. ‘I’ve been waiting the entire game, and I’ve been waiting for you to expose your king. Here’s my queen, and I’m going to end this game right now.’ And the revelation that Nestor has been involved in this nefarious activity with a bigger objective in mind, with trying to find freedom for Cuba; that he never left that fight, even though Román did, and he moved on, and he started raising his daughter because of that necessity. But I think both of those men very intentionally use that moment because they hear, ‘Oh, he’s getting married. We need to intentionally put a stop to that, because we know something.’”

Pino points out there were beats earlier in the season when Nestor was pushing his brother to find out how serious his relationship with Marisol was. “Maybe Nestor’s known that the whole time, and that’s why he asked,” Pino speculates. “And he invites them over so you can see where it’s going. So he’s ultimately sort of that Godfather figure, he’s the puppeteer, even though Román thinks that he is. And so that’s where the power comes in, right? It’s both family and power in that scene—and Hal and Nestor use it in a way to influence Román to join the fight. So when we’re speculating what that might be in [a potential] season 2, I think it’s their way to ensnare Román into this effort that they’ve both been conspiring to make happen for years.”

Vazquez also found out about the twist potentially happening during production, but didn’t realize the writers were serious until the end of the season. “I was like, ‘Oh, Sweet Jesus,’” he recalls. “Because talk about a game changer…I mean, it’s so damn juicy. God only knows where that’s gonna go. I thought it was great.”

But despite Nestor knowing pre-finale about Estela being alive, Vazquez is adamant it was for the best he, as a performer, didn’t know where the show was going. “I’d rather not know, because you can kind of play the end of something,” he explains. “The most important thing to me is what’s happening in the scene at the moment. I don’t want to know, because that’s all that really matters: What is happening between these two people right now…I’m actually glad that I didn’t know for sure if they were going to pull the trigger on that.”

If the show returns for a second season, both actors are excited and intrigued about where the story could go. 

“Now, you’re about to tie the American intelligence apparatus into the show [with the CIA]—that’s a much bigger conversation,” Vazquez points out. “The CIA station in Miami was right by the University of Miami, and it was one of the first, if not maybe like the first, domestic CIA office that was operational. And that happened in the ‘50s, late ‘50s, because of everything that was cooking in Cuba and Central America.”

“I don’t know what’s going to happen, and I’m not so sure that Chris knows what’s going to happen,” Pino adds. “Chris does a fantastic job—along with Michael Panes and our writing staff—of painting themselves into a corner, only to find a way through a wall or through the roof or digging a hole to get out of the situation. So I don’t know how [this cliffhanger is] going to get resolved. I just know that it’s inflammatory and it’ll change the course of our show.”

RELATED:

• HOTEL COCAINE: Maurice Compte Reflects on Helping Bring a Fictionalized Version of His Father to Life
• HOTEL COCAINE: Yul Vazquez and Danny Pino Dissect Nestor and Román’s Tense Confrontation
• 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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