Eugenio Derbez: The Life Story Behind Mexico's Comedy King

Born Into Mexican Show Business

Eugenio Derbez was born in Mexico City on 2 September 1961, to Silvia Derbez, one of Mexico’s most respected actresses, and Eugenio González Salas, a publicist, and he grew up inside the world of Mexican entertainment, because his mother’s work meant that actors, directors and writers were part of his everyday life rather than distant figures on a screen. Silvia Derbez was a star of Mexican cinema and television, known for her elegance and her professionalism, and her son watched her work from a young age, learning how an actor prepares, how a set runs and how a career is built over decades rather than overnight. Growing up as the child of a famous actress had advantages and pressures, because the doors were open to him in a way they were not open to other young people, yet the expectations were also higher, since everyone assumed he would either follow his mother or fail trying, and the shadow of a famous parent is a difficult place to build a career. Eugenio has spoken about those years with affection and with honesty, because he loved the world he grew up in, yet he also knew that he would have to prove himself on his own terms, and that the audience would not love him simply because they had loved his mother. Mexico City in the 1960s and 1970s was the centre of Spanish-language entertainment, with Televisa producing telenovelas that were watched across Latin America, and a boy growing up in that city, in that family, could hardly avoid the business, yet Eugenio’s path into it was his own, through comedy rather than drama, through making people laugh rather than making them cry.

He began acting as a child, appearing in small roles and learning the craft from the inside, and as a teenager he began to develop the talent that would define his career, which was comedy, not the comedy of jokes told on a stage but the comedy of characters, of voices, of the small details that make a person funny. He studied acting and began working in Mexican television in the 1980s, taking roles in telenovelas and comedy shows, and he learned the discipline of television work, which in Mexico meant long hours, fast shooting schedules and an audience that expected to be entertained every night. The Mexican comedy tradition he inherited was a rich one, going back to Cantinflas and Tin Tan, comedians who had made the whole Spanish-speaking world laugh, and Eugenio understood that tradition and wanted to be part of it, yet he also wanted to make it his own, with characters that belonged to his generation and his city. He began creating characters, voices and sketches, and the work was slow, because comedy is the hardest kind of acting to get right, and a character who is funny once may not be funny twice, yet he persisted, and the persistence paid off, because by the early 1990s he had his own show and his own audience, and the boy who had grown up in his mother’s shadow was becoming a star in his own right, on his own terms, in his own voice.

The show that made him famous in Mexico was Al Derecho y al Derbez, which began in 1993, a sketch comedy programme in which Eugenio played a series of characters, each with a distinct voice, costume and personality, and the show became a hit because Mexican audiences recognised the characters as people they knew, the arrogant official, the nervous clerk, the overconfident lover, and laughed at them because they recognised themselves. He followed it with Derbez en cuando in 1998 and XHDRbZ in 2002, shows that continued the sketch format and added new characters, and each of them was watched by millions of people in Mexico, because sketch comedy in Mexico, as in many countries, is a shared experience, watched by families together and quoted the next day at school and at work. The characters he created in those years became part of Mexican popular culture, and his catchphrases and voices were imitated across the country, which is the mark of a comedian who has truly connected with an audience. Yet even as the television career grew, Eugenio was thinking about the next step, because television comedy, for all its success, is a local art, watched in one country and in one language, and he had begun to wonder whether his comedy could travel, whether the characters he had created in Mexico City could make people laugh in Los Angeles, and that question would define the next twenty years of his life.

La Familia P. Luche and the Characters Mexico Loved

In 2002 Eugenio created the show that would become his most beloved work in Mexico, La familia P. Luche, a sitcom about a dysfunctional family living in a fictional city, in which he played Ludovico P. Luche, the father, a man whose hair was covered in fur, whose clothes were made of fur, and whose family lived in a house where everything, including the furniture, was covered in fur. The premise sounds strange, and it was, yet the show worked because the family, for all its strangeness, was recognisable, a family that argued, that loved each other, that faced the same problems as any other family, only with more fur, and the audience loved it. La familia P. Luche ran, with breaks, from 2002 to 2012, and it became one of the most popular sitcoms in Mexican television history, watched by millions of people and repeated for years afterwards, because the characters, Ludovico, his wife Federica, played by Consuelo Duval, and their children, were people the audience felt they knew. The show also showed Eugenio’s range as a comedian, because Ludovico was not a sketch character who appeared for five minutes but a fully realised person who had to be funny, sad, angry and loving across many episodes, and the discipline of playing the same character for a decade taught him how to sustain a performance over time. The fur, which became the show’s visual signature, was also a metaphor, because the P. Luche family was a family that was different on the outside and ordinary on the inside, and that difference, between how a family looks and how it feels, was the joke that kept the show alive for a decade.

While La familia P. Luche was running, Eugenio continued to create new characters and new shows, and he also began to think about film, because Mexican cinema in the 2000s was changing, with directors like Alfonso Cuarón, Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu making films that were seen around the world, and Eugenio wondered whether a comedian could make a film that would travel in the same way. He had appeared in films before, but always as a supporting actor, and the idea of directing and starring in his own film, a film that would be funny and emotional at the same time, began to take shape in his mind. The characters he had created on television had taught him how to make an audience laugh, but film required something more, a story that could sustain two hours, characters who could grow and change, and an ending that would leave the audience feeling something, and those were skills he had not yet tested. He also knew that the Mexican audience, which had loved him on television for twenty years, would follow him to the cinema if the film was good, and that the Spanish-speaking audience in the United States, millions of people who watched Mexican television and who missed home, would be an audience for a film that spoke to them in their own language. The film he eventually made would answer all of those questions at once, and it would change his life in a way that no television show ever had.

The film was Instructions Not Included, known in Spanish as No se aceptan devoluciones, released in 2013, and Eugenio directed it and starred in it as Valentín Bravo, a carefree bachelor in Acapulco who discovers that a former lover has left a baby daughter on his doorstep, and who must learn to be a father. The film was a comedy and a drama at the same time, because Valentín’s attempts to raise his daughter, Maggie, played by Loreto Peralta, were funny, yet the film’s ending, in which Maggie’s mother returns and the truth about Maggie’s health is revealed, was heartbreaking, and the combination of laughter and tears was exactly what Mexican audiences loved. Instructions Not Included became the highest-grossing Spanish-language film in the United States, earning more than 44 million dollars there, and it became a phenomenon, because it proved that a Spanish-language film, made by a Mexican comedian, could succeed in American cinemas without stars, without English and without a Hollywood studio behind it. The film’s success changed Eugenio’s career, because it made him a film star as well as a television star, and it opened the door to Hollywood, where producers who had never watched Mexican television now knew his name and wanted to work with him. It also proved something about the audience, which is that the Spanish-speaking audience in the United States was large, loyal and hungry for stories in its own language, and that Hollywood had been ignoring it for too long.

Hollywood, CODA and Acapulco

After Instructions Not Included, Eugenio began working in Hollywood, and the roles he took showed the same pattern as his Mexican career, a mixture of comedy and drama, of leading roles and supporting roles, and of films that were made for different audiences. In 2017 he played the wealthy, ageing playboy Maximo in How to Be a Latin Lover, a comedy about a man who has lived off rich women all his life and must learn to survive when the money runs out, opposite Salma Hayek, and the film was a commercial success in the United States, because it spoke to the same audience that had loved Instructions Not Included. In 2018 he played Leonardo Montenegro in Overboard, a remake of the 1987 romantic comedy, opposite Anna Faris, and the film reversed the original’s story, with Eugenio as the rich man who loses his memory and Anna Faris as the working-class woman who convinces him he is her husband, and the film’s humour came from the clash between his character’s arrogance and his new life as a labourer. In 2022 he played the valet Antonio in The Valet, a romantic comedy about a man who is hired to pretend to be the boyfriend of a famous actress, and the film was praised for its warmth and its performances. Each of these films was a Hollywood comedy, yet each of them was also a Mexican story, because Eugenio brought his own humour, his own timing and his own point of view to them, and the audience could tell the difference between a Hollywood comedy with a Mexican actor and a Mexican comedy made in Hollywood, and Eugenio’s films were the second kind.

The most important film of his Hollywood career, and the one that brought him the most respect from critics, was CODA, released in 2021 and directed by Sian Heder, in which he played Bernardo Villalobos, known as Mr. V, the choir teacher at a school in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who recognises the singing talent of Ruby Rossi, played by Emilia Jones, the only hearing person in a deaf family. Mr. V was a warm, funny, demanding teacher who pushed Ruby to audition for the Berklee College of Music in Boston, and Eugenio played him with a generosity and a humour that made the character one of the film’s most loved, because he was the adult who believed in Ruby when her own family could not understand her dream. CODA won the Academy Award for Best Picture, the first film distributed by a streaming service to win that prize, and it also won awards for its supporting actor Troy Kotsur and for its adapted screenplay, and Eugenio’s performance was praised as a key part of the film’s success. The role mattered because it showed that Eugenio could play a dramatic supporting role in an English-language film and be as good as any American actor, and it proved that his talent was not limited to comedy or to Spanish, but was a talent for acting itself. He has said that CODA was a special experience, because the film’s story, about a family that communicates differently and a girl who must choose between her family and her dream, resonated with his own life as the son of a famous actress who had to find his own voice.

In 2021 Eugenio also began starring in the Apple TV+ series Acapulco, in which he played the older Máximo Gallardo, a wealthy businessman who tells the story of his youth, when he worked at a luxury resort in Acapulco in the 1980s, played in the flashbacks by Enrique Arrizon. The series was a comedy about ambition, about a young man from a poor background who dreams of a better life, and it was also a love letter to Acapulco, the city where Eugenio had set Instructions Not Included, and to Mexico in the 1980s, a time that many Mexican viewers remembered with nostalgia. Acapulco ran for several seasons and was praised for its warmth, its humour and its performances, and it gave Eugenio a leading role in a streaming series, which is a different kind of fame from television or film, because the audience watches at home, on their own schedule, and the show becomes part of their daily life. In 2023 he starred in Radical, a drama based on the true story of Sergio Juárez Correa, a teacher in a poor town in Mexico who uses unconventional methods to inspire his students, and the film was praised at the Sundance Film Festival and became a success in Mexico, because it told a story about education and hope that resonated with audiences. Each of these projects, CODA, Acapulco and Radical, showed a different side of Eugenio Derbez, the teacher, the storyteller and the serious actor, and together they proved that his career, which began in sketch comedy, had grown into something much larger.

Family, Fame and the Walk of Fame

Eugenio Derbez’s family life has been as public as his career, because his children have followed him into entertainment, and the Derbez family has become one of Mexico’s most famous show business families. His daughter Aislinn Derbez, his sons Vadhir Derbez and José Eduardo Derbez, and his youngest daughter Aitana, have all worked in acting and entertainment, and the family has appeared together in the reality series De viaje con los Derbez, in which they travel together and the audience sees their relationships, their arguments and their affection. Eugenio married the singer and actress Alessandra Rosaldo in 2012, and their marriage has been a stable part of his life, which is notable in an industry where marriages often do not last, and he has spoken about his family with pride and with honesty, because he knows that his children grew up in the same world he did, as the children of famous parents, and that they face the same pressures he faced. In 2016 he received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, an honour that recognised his contribution to entertainment in the United States, and the ceremony was attended by his family and by Mexican fans who had travelled to Los Angeles to celebrate, because the star was not only his but theirs, a recognition that a Mexican comedian could be honoured in Hollywood. The star sits on Hollywood Boulevard, among the stars of the greatest names in entertainment, and it is a reminder that a boy who grew up in Mexico City, in the shadow of his famous mother, could become a star in his own right, in his own language and in his own voice, and that the journey from Mexico City to Hollywood is one that many have attempted and few have completed.

His work as a producer has also grown, because he has used his success to create opportunities for other Mexican talent, producing films and television shows through his production company, and supporting stories that might not otherwise have been told. He has spoken about the importance of representation, of Mexican and Latino stories being told by Mexican and Latino people, and his career has been a practical example of that principle, because he did not wait for Hollywood to offer him roles but created his own, first on Mexican television, then in Mexican film, and then in Hollywood, on his own terms. He has also been involved in charity work, supporting causes related to children and to the environment, and he has used his public profile to speak about issues that matter to him, without turning his social media into a lecture, which is a balance that many celebrities fail to maintain. The Derbez family, the Walk of Fame star, the production company and the charity work are all parts of a career that has grown far beyond the sketch comedy shows of the 1990s, and they show a man who has thought about his legacy, about what he will leave behind when the applause fades, and who has decided that the legacy should be more than laughter, though laughter, he would be the first to say, is a good place to start.

What the Career Adds Up To

Looked at as a whole, Eugenio Derbez’s career has a shape that is easy to miss if you only remember one role, because it is the shape of a person who began in the shadow of a famous mother, built a career in Mexican television comedy, made a film that broke records in the United States, and then became a respected actor in Hollywood, all while keeping his family close and his humour intact. He has played a father covered in fur, a bachelor who becomes a father, a Latin lover, a choir teacher and a resort worker, and each of those roles was different, which is why he has lasted while other comedians have faded. The through-line is not fame but connection, because he has always connected with his audience, whether they were Mexican families watching La familia P. Luche, Spanish-speaking viewers in the United States watching Instructions Not Included, or American audiences watching CODA, and that connection is built on honesty, on playing characters who feel real even when the situation is absurd. His story also says something useful about where talent comes from and where it can go, because a boy who grew up in Mexico City, in a family of performers, can end up with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and an Academy Award-winning film on his résumé, and the distance between those two places, which once seemed impossible to cross, turns out to have been crossable all along, by a man who made people laugh and who never stopped learning.

The Comedian Who Became a Filmmaker

There is one more part of Eugenio Derbez’s story that deserves attention, and it is the way he became a filmmaker, because directing Instructions Not Included was not a vanity project but a necessity, since the film he wanted to make did not exist and nobody else was going to make it for him. He wrote the story, he directed it, he starred in it, and he took the risk that it would fail, because a comedian directing a drama about a father and a daughter could easily have been a disaster, yet the film worked, and its success proved that he understood story as well as he understood jokes. That understanding, that a film needs a beginning, a middle and an end, and that the audience must care about the characters before they can laugh or cry, is the understanding of a filmmaker, not only of a comedian, and it is the reason his later work, including Radical, has been taken seriously by critics. He has said that directing taught him to think about the whole film rather than only about his own performance, and that lesson has made him a better actor, because he now understands what the director needs and how to give it to them. The comedian who became a filmmaker is a story that has been told before, by Charlie Chaplin and by Woody Allen, yet Eugenio’s version is his own, because it began in Mexico City, in the shadow of his mother, and it ended, for now, with a star on Hollywood Boulevard and a film that won the Academy Award for Best Picture, and that is a journey worth remembering.

My Take:

When I look at Eugenio Derbez’s career, the first thing that strikes me is how long it has lasted and how many different audiences it has reached, because he began in Mexican television in the 1980s, became a star in the 1990s, made a record-breaking film in 2013, and was in an Academy Award-winning film in 2021, which means his career spans four decades and three countries, and very few comedians can say that. I think his most important decision was the decision to direct Instructions Not Included, because it was a film that nobody else would have made, a Spanish-language comedy-drama about a bachelor who becomes a father, and he made it himself, with his own money and his own belief, and the film’s success proved that the Spanish-speaking audience in the United States was real, large and hungry, and that Hollywood had been ignoring it. The film’s ending, in which the audience learns the truth about Maggie’s health, is the kind of ending that only works if the audience has come to love the characters, and Eugenio, as both director and actor, made the audience love them, which is why the tears at the end felt earned rather than manipulated. I admire the courage of that decision, because a television comedian who directs a film is taking a risk that could destroy his reputation, and Eugenio took it, and the risk paid off, which is why his career changed after 2013 in a way it never had before.

The CODA performance deserves a closer look, because it is the role that proved Eugenio Derbez could act in English, in a drama, in a supporting part, and be as good as anyone in the film, which is a test that many comedians fail, because the audience expects them to be funny and cannot accept them being serious. Mr. V, the choir teacher, was a warm, funny, demanding man who believed in Ruby Rossi when her own family could not understand her dream, and Eugenio played him with a generosity that made the character feel like a real teacher, the kind of teacher that every student remembers, because he was tough when he needed to be and kind when it mattered. I notice that the best scenes in CODA are the ones where Mr. V is teaching, where he is pushing Ruby to sing louder, to feel the music, to believe in herself, and those scenes work because Eugenio understood that teaching is a form of love, and that a teacher who cares is a powerful figure in a young person’s life. The film’s Academy Award for Best Picture matters, because it means that Eugenio’s name is now attached to a film that will be remembered for decades, and that is a legacy that no television show, however popular, can give an actor. I also think the role showed his range, because Mr. V was not a Mexican character, he was an American teacher, and Eugenio played him without an accent, without a stereotype, as a person, which is the hardest thing for an actor who has been typecast to do.

What I admire most about Eugenio Derbez is the connection he has with his audience, because he has never lost it, whether the audience was Mexican families watching La familia P. Luche, Spanish-speaking viewers in the United States watching Instructions Not Included, or American audiences watching CODA, and that connection is built on honesty, on playing characters who feel real even when the situation is absurd. La familia P. Luche is the clearest example, because the show’s premise, a family covered in fur, sounds like a joke, yet the show lasted for a decade because the family felt real, because Ludovico loved his wife and children, because the arguments were the arguments of a real family, and because the audience recognised themselves in the P. Luche family, which is why they kept watching. I also think his family life matters, because the Derbez family has become a dynasty, with his children working in entertainment, and the fact that he has supported them without controlling them, that he has let them find their own voices, is a sign of a father who understands the business, because he grew up as the child of a famous actress and knows the pressures. There are limits to what he has done, and I should name them, because his Hollywood comedies, How to Be a Latin Lover and Overboard, were commercial successes but not critical ones, and the question of whether he can carry a serious dramatic film as a leading man, in the way he carried Instructions Not Included, is still open, yet Radical suggests that he can, and that the next chapter may be his most serious yet.

For young performers, especially those from Mexico and Latin America, Eugenio Derbez’s career is a useful map, because it shows that the way to succeed is not to wait for Hollywood to call but to create your own work, first on television, then in film, and to build an audience that follows you, because an audience that follows you is more valuable than a studio that hires you. His decision to direct, to produce and to create his own production company was a decision to take control of his career, and that control has given him a freedom that most actors never have, the freedom to choose the stories he wants to tell, in the language he wants to tell them, for the audience he wants to reach. My honest view is that Eugenio Derbez is one of the most important figures in Spanish-language entertainment, and that his career, taken as a whole, is stronger than any single film or show in it, because it is the story of a boy who grew up in his mother’s shadow and became a star in his own right, a comedian who became a filmmaker, and a Mexican actor who became a Hollywood star without ceasing to be Mexican. The work continues, Acapulco has given him a new audience, Radical has given him new respect, and the next chapter, whatever it is, will probably be as surprising as the last one, because Eugenio Derbez has never done the expected thing twice.

One more thing about Eugenio Derbez deserves to be said, and it is the way he has handled being a public figure in Mexico, a country where television stars are treated as members of the family and where the audience feels entitled to know everything about them. He has kept his private life largely private, he has spoken about his family without turning them into a spectacle, and he has used his platform to talk about issues that matter to him, including representation and education, without becoming a lecturer, and that balance is hard to maintain in a culture that rewards oversharing. I think his work as a producer matters more than it might seem, because it puts him in the position of the person who creates opportunities for others, and the films and shows he has produced have given work to Mexican actors, writers and directors who might not otherwise have had it, which is a form of generosity that the audience rarely sees but that the industry feels. The story of Eugenio Derbez is, in the end, a story about a man who made people laugh for forty years and who, in the process, became a filmmaker, a father, a star and a bridge between two cultures, and that is a story worth telling, because it shows that comedy, when it is done well, is not a lesser art but a serious one, and that the comedian who makes an audience laugh has done something that matters.

Finally, I want to say something about Instructions Not Included, because it is the film that defines his career, and it deserves to be remembered not only as a box office success but as a film that changed the way Hollywood thought about the Spanish-speaking audience. Before that film, Hollywood assumed that Spanish-language films could not succeed in American cinemas, and after it, the studios knew that they could, because the audience was there, waiting, and the film proved it, by earning more than 44 million dollars in the United States, a figure that no Spanish-language film had reached before. The film’s success opened doors not only for Eugenio but for other Mexican filmmakers, because it showed the studios that the audience existed, and that is a legacy that goes beyond any single performance. My honest view is that Eugenio Derbez’s career is not finished, and that the best of it may still be ahead, because the roles for men in their sixties, the teachers, the fathers, the men with pasts, are the roles he was born to play, and the seriousness he showed in CODA and Radical suggests that he is ready for them. When those roles come, the story will change again, and the comedian from Mexico City will become something else, and that is a story worth waiting for, because it is the story of a person becoming himself in public, one role at a time, for forty years.

I want to say more about the business side of Eugenio Derbez’s career, because it is easy to talk about his performances and to forget that he is also a producer and a businessman who built a production company and created opportunities for other people. After Instructions Not Included, he could have taken the money and the Hollywood offers and spent the rest of his career as an actor for hire, yet he chose to produce, to develop stories, to hire Mexican writers and directors, and to build an infrastructure that would outlast any single film, and that choice shows a long-term way of thinking that is rare in entertainment. His production company has made films and television shows that gave work to Mexican talent, and the fact that he did this while also acting, directing and raising a family suggests a capacity for work that is easy to underestimate, because the audience sees the performance and not the meetings, the budgets and the decisions that made the performance possible. I think this producing work will be an important part of his legacy, because the films he produced will employ people, tell stories and reach audiences long after his own acting career has ended, and that is a form of generosity that the industry needs more of, from people who have succeeded and who remember what it was like to need a chance.

Another part of his story that deserves a closer look is the relationship between his comedy and his drama, because many people assume that comedy and drama are opposites, and Eugenio’s career proves that they are not, but that they are two sides of the same skill, which is the skill of understanding people. A comedian must understand what makes people laugh, which means understanding their fears, their vanities and their hopes, and a dramatic actor must understand the same things, because drama is also about fear, vanity and hope, only without the laugh at the end. Eugenio’s best dramatic work, in CODA and Radical, works because he brings the comedian’s understanding of people to it, the ability to see a character whole, with flaws and virtues together, and his best comedy works because he brings the dramatic actor’s seriousness to it, the refusal to treat a joke as a throwaway. I notice that the funniest moments in La familia P. Luche are often the saddest ones, when Ludovico realises he has failed his family, and the saddest moments in Instructions Not Included are often the funniest, when Valentín tries to be a father and gets it wrong, and that mixture, of laughter and tears in the same scene, is the signature of his work, and it is why his career has lasted while other comedians, who could only make people laugh, have faded.

Finally, I think Eugenio Derbez’s career offers a lesson about language, because he built his career in Spanish, in a world where English is often treated as the only language that matters, and he proved that a story told in Spanish can reach audiences around the world, can earn 44 million dollars in the United States, and can win the Academy Award for Best Picture. That proof matters, not only for Mexican performers but for performers in every language, because it says that the audience does not care what language a story is told in, only whether the story is true, and that a comedian from Mexico City can make the whole world laugh and cry in Spanish. My honest view is that his career is not finished, and that the next chapter, whether it is another film as a director, another series like Acapulco, or a dramatic role like the one in Radical, will add to a legacy that is already one of the most important in Spanish-language entertainment. The boy who grew up in his mother’s shadow has become a man who casts his own shadow, and that shadow now covers Mexico, the United States and the world, and it is a shadow made of laughter, which is, in the end, the best kind of shadow there is.

Frequently Asked Questions

Where was Eugenio Derbez born?

Eugenio Derbez was born in Mexico City on 2 September 1961, to the actress Silvia Derbez and the publicist Eugenio González Salas.

What was Eugenio Derbez’s first famous television show?

Al Derecho y al Derbez, a sketch comedy programme that began in 1993, made him famous in Mexico. He followed it with Derbez en cuando (1998) and XHDRbZ (2002).

Who did Eugenio Derbez play in La familia P. Luche?

He played Ludovico P. Luche, the father of a family whose hair, clothes and home were covered in fur. The sitcom ran from 2002 to 2012.

What is Instructions Not Included?

Instructions Not Included (No se aceptan devoluciones, 2013) is a film directed by and starring Eugenio Derbez as Valentín Bravo, a bachelor in Acapulco who must raise a baby daughter left on his doorstep. It became the highest-grossing Spanish-language film in the United States.

Who did Eugenio Derbez play in CODA?

He played Bernardo Villalobos, known as Mr. V, the choir teacher who encourages Ruby Rossi to audition for the Berklee College of Music. CODA (2021) won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

What is the Apple TV+ series Acapulco?

Acapulco (2021) is a comedy series in which Eugenio Derbez plays the older Máximo Gallardo, who tells the story of his youth working at a luxury resort in Acapulco in the 1980s.

What is Radical?

Radical (2023) is a drama starring Eugenio Derbez, based on the true story of Sergio Juárez Correa, a teacher in a poor Mexican town who uses unconventional methods to inspire his students.

When did Eugenio Derbez receive a Hollywood Walk of Fame star?

He received his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2016, recognising his contribution to entertainment in the United States.