“Insecure, addicted to pills, beauty-obsessed.”
Mexican-American actress Kate del Castillo doesn’t mince words in describing her character in the new Spanish-language television series “Armas de Mujer” (‘Til Jail Do Us Part), which premieres Thursday in the United States on Peacock, NBCUniversal’s streaming service, and on HBO Max in the rest of the world.
In an interview with Efe, Del Castillo said her latest role as Angela, a woman whose husband has been arrested for membership in a crime gang, took her much further out of her comfort zone than did her role as drug lord Teresa Mendoza in the Telemundo telenovela “La Reina del Sur” (The Queen of the South), whose third season will premiere next month.
“Armas de mujer,” a Cholawood production for Telemundo Studios, tells the story of four women with disastrous significant others who must work together to survive and assert some control over their lives.
Also starring in the series – created by Jose Luis Acosta and featuring Enrique Begne and Claudia Pedraza as directors – are Puerto Ricans Roselyn Sanchez and Jeimy Osorio and Mexican Sylvia Saenz.
“It’s a different project, one in which we were able to show Latinos’ diversity, Hispanic women’s strength,” Del Castillo said of a series that was filmed at Telemundo Studios in Miami in early 2021.
TV viewers will see a brand new Del Castillo in “Armas de Mujer,” a green-eyed blonde who the actress said is “very absent-minded, very feminine, anxious, obsessed with how she looks and what people think of her.”
“She’s a woman who suffers mental alterations to a degree. So she takes a lot of pills. She’s addicted to pills,” the she added.
Del Castillo said it was a “blast” to play the character because “she and I are completely different, not only physically but also her way of talking, thinking, moving, everything. So it was a lot of fun.”
The characters must discover inner reserves of strength when their husbands are sent to prison and they try to avoid being implicated in their crimes while surviving day to day.
“There’s drama, but it’s also a lot of fun because there’s a lot of black comedy. All of us, starting with Kate, brought something new to the table acting-wise for the audience,” Sanchez said.
Del Castillo has been working tirelessly in recent months.
Accompanied by her fellow co-founders of Cholawood Productions, she has produced a film titled “Hunting Ana Bravo” that will be available on The Roku Channel in the US and streamed on Prime Video in the rest of the world.
She also is currently filming a new movie titled “A Cuban Girl’s Guide to Tea and Tomorrow”; is an executive producer of “A Beautiful Lie,” a TV series now in pre-production that follows the story of a Mexican gold medal-winning Olympic diver and is a Hispanic version of Leo Tolstoy’s classic novel “Anna Karenina”; and is preparing a talk show-type program.
The actor and producer also recently traveled from Miami to Colombia, Bolivia, Argentina, Peru and her native Mexico to film outdoor scenes for the third season of “La Reina del Sur,” which will premiere on Telemundo in the US on Oct. 17.