Father of the Bride is back, back, back again– and it has Miami and Latinx culture at the forefront this time. The Warner Bros. film on HBO Max centers on the Herreras and the Castillos, who come together for…you guessed it…a wedding!

Ahead of the film’s premiere, Shadow and Act spoke to the film’s stars, Gloria Estefan, Andy Garcia, Adria Arjona, Diego Boneta, Isabella Merced and Chloe Fineman about the film and how it portrays different facets of being Latinx as well as what family means. Sofia Herrera (Arjona) is excited to marry Adan Castillo (Boneta), but little does she know this comes as her parents, Ingrid (Estefan) and Billy (Garcia) are already going through something.

This is Estefan’s first major film role and she said that only a project like this would have brought her to the world of movies.

“It’s really important what I say yes to, and for many times, they’ve sent me things that I didn’t think put us in a good light or was stereotypical of our culture,” she explained. “So I’ve stayed away from that, but when Andy sent me the text saying, ‘I’m sending you a script,’ I already trusted it because I trust his taste and what projects he says yes to, and then director Gaz Alazraki, I had just viewed his film Nosotros los Nobles and I thought [it] was so incredible. I did background on him, because I wanted to see who had done this with so much heart. I knew that we were going to be in good hands, I trusted that, you know, my first lead role was going to be well protected by the people that were in the cast and producing the film. It’s important for us to represent our culture in a respectful and wonderful way that broadens people’s views of who we are, and I thought this gave the great opportunity to do that.”

Garcia spoke about how he was able to include all of the experiences from being a father–as well as other fathers he’s been around– to bring together his character.

“I think [it’s] an amalgamation of everything I’ve learned, who I am, and the fathers I’ve been exposed to– whether it be my own or other fathers [or just] the cultural history of what makes up these people when they come to this country at such an early age. My youngest daughter, the first thing she said to me when she saw the movie was, ‘You’re nothing like this guy.’ And I think there are elements of the character that I that are that I am very much like that. You pull from everything to have this genuine experience, and [that’s] the idea of living truthfully, within this imaginary circumstance. Why wouldn’t Gloria and I use our 30 or 40-year friendship and [make it] a part of that backstory? The only thing that’s not we’re not married to one another, but we are married in in a similar cause and we live our lives in very similar ways. We’re both in long-standing marriages, we believe in and fight for a lot of the same things in our life. We have the same point of view and we’ve got each other’s back. There’s a lot of things that are inherent in us. So we’re the perfect co-stars of this particular movie.”

Check out the full interviews, which also feature Boneta, Arjona, Merced and Fineman, below:

Andy Garcia

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