Earlier this year, El Rey made an appearance at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour and introduced their first original show, From Dusk Till Dawn, and today they are back at the Summer Press Tour to present two of their new series, Matador and The Director’s Chair.
Matador
After the successful launch of its first original series From Dusk Till Dawn, El Rey is ready to launch its second original series, Matador, for which it already ordered a second season. This new series is a spy thriller following the adventures of Tony “Matador” Bravo (Gabriel Luna), an undercover CIA agent who becomes a soccer star as part of his cover.
The presentation panel for Matador included series stars Gabriel Luna, Alfred Molina, Nicky Whelan, and executive producers Roberto Orci, Dan Dworkin, Jay Beattie, and Robert Rodriguez.
Here are some highlights from the panel:
- One of the things they wanted to do with the show is show characters you don’t usually see on TV and keep the realism that not all Hispanics in the US speak spanish. They wanted to represent that part of the population in the show.
- Robert Rodriguez directed the first episode of the series.
- Rodriguez shared that this is his “dream show to do.” He especially loves how expensive the story is and how unpredictable and engaging the characters are.
- Because the show got an immediate series pick up, the team was able to plan the entire season form the beginning which they really think benefited the show.
- Alfred Moline explained that his character starts off as the bad guy but we’ll find that he has layers of humanity and other layers where he denies his humanity. He’s a self made man and very proud of it.
Matador premieres on July 15th at 9pm.
The Director’s Chair
In addition to Matador, El Rey will also premiere a new hour-long series, The Director’s Chair, which was described as a director interviewing another director about how they do their job.
Robert Rodriguez so far is the one conducting the interviews and during the panel he explained that what he was looking to do during the interviews was the piece together why the directors are the way they are. Kind of “like a detective.” Some of the directors interviewed by Rodriguez include Guillermo Del Toro and Quentin Tarantino. However, Rodriguez did mention that ideally he’d like to have other directors conduct interviews later on and for them to get to interview the directors they are interested in talking to.
For people fascinated with the filmmaking process, movies or anyone who wants to get into the head of some of their favorite directors, The Director’s Chair seems to offer quite the chance to do just that. In fact, a clip was shown during the panel which is part of the Quentin Tarantino’s two part interview. The clip in question showed a video that Rodriguez had shot of Tarantino back in 1994 when Tarantino first read him the script of what would become Kill Bill. That clip was followed by another clip from 2001 in which Tarantino reads another draft of Kill Bill.
This is the kind of insight it seems we can expect from the show and if it’s something that interests you, make sure to give it a look. The Guillermo Del Toro episode will air on July 30th and the Quentin Tarantino’s two episodes will air August 13th and 27th.
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