Have you ever wondered what actors are actually snorting when they rack up a line of white powder on camera? Well, who better to answer that than Hotel Cocaine’s Danny Pino and Yul Vazquez?
The men play brothers in Stan’s thriller series, which is set in a 70s night club and naturally, involves a whole lot of ‘cocaine’.
When asked by Chattr what the little (or big!) white lines are really made of, Danny, who plays Roman Compte, joked that the actors legitimately took cocaine.
“It’s cocaine, that’s why it’s so expensive to shoot,” he laughed.
Yul, who plays Nestor Cabal, debunked Danny’s joke.
“I believe it is powered milk,” he clarified.
Danny added: “It might be powdered milk, which, by the way, is explosive for the people who are lactose intolerant.”
Danny and Yul’s characters drew parallels to their real lives
Danny’s character is a Cuban exile who’s the general manager of the Miami hot spot, The Mutiny Hotel, the location where a whole lot of drug-related debauchery takes place.
Roman’s brother, Nestor is one of Miami’s biggest suppliers of cocaine, and he finds himself in a sticky situation when he’s caught between his brother’s business and the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Both Yul and Danny have a deep-rooted connection to both the Cuban culture, and the city of Miami, which is something they opened up about during their interview with Chattr.
“It’s very personal to me. It’s my family’s history. My uncle was in the Bay of Pigs invasion. So it’s all super personal to me,” Yul explained.
Danny, who was born in 1974 in Miami, Florida to Cuban parents, said that Hotel Cocaine only represents a small “sliver” of Cuban culture.
“The vast majority of the Cuban American Experience has nothing to do with narcotics, or, you know, criminality, or any of that,” he explained.
“There’s a sliver of that experience that we’re exploring that catalyzes, the drama of our show. Infusing the Cuban American experience with the reality in 1978 of this sort of burgeoning cocaine war, makes the decisions that the characters have to evaluate much more life and death.
“With a backdrop of the geopolitics of Cuba, and the influence of Russia, and the US during the Cold War and using Cuban Americans and Cubans as proxies to fight that war, that’s also a backdrop of our show.”
Stream Hotel Cocaine on Stan.
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