On the Shelf
The Undoing of Alejandro Velasco
By Diego BonetaAmazon Crossing: 284 pages, $17If you purchase books linked on our web site, The Occasions might earn a fee from Bookshop.org, whose charges assist impartial bookstores.
The one most important piece of profession recommendation Diego Boneta ever obtained got here from none apart from Tom Cruise — and it wasn’t a tip about how you can soar off airplanes.
“Tom Cruise told me, ‘Listen Diego, don’t just be an actor,’” Boneta, 34, recollects throughout a current cellphone dialog. The 2 met whereas making the 2012 musical comedy “Rock of Ages.” For the then-burgeoning Mexican star, that movie represented a turning level. He stays grateful that the film icon took the time to mentor him when he was attempting to interrupt into Hollywood.
It’s not that Boneta had any bother diversifying his talent set earlier than. He had already acted in loads of cleaning soap operas in Mexico and launched two pop albums as a singer previous to attempting his luck within the English-speaking market. However touchdown roles in American productions as a Mexican actor proved uniquely difficult.
“In this business you have very little control of any outcome, and it’s not a meritocracy,” Boneta says. “As an actor you’re stuck with what’s being cast. Tom’s point was for me to try to create my own stories.”
And that he’s carried out. By Three Amigos, the manufacturing firm he established along with his supervisor and buddy Josh Glick in 2017, Boneta developed, produced and starred in Netflix’s “Luis Miguel: The Series” concerning the famed singer.
His debut novel, “The Undoing of Alejandro Velasco,” a recent thriller set amid the Mexican higher crust within the picturesque city of San Miguel de Allende, is out Thursday by way of Amazon Crossing.
The tome developed from what Boneta initially envisioned as a screenplay impressed by a number of the roles he had auditioned for and misplaced. Round that point, his sister, Natalia González Boneta, joined Three Amigos and made a radical suggestion.
“She was like, ‘Instead of writing a script, why don’t you try to write a novel?’ I thought, ‘You’re out of your mind. I’m barely trying to write a script here,’” Boneta recollects laughing.
Their firm already had an general cope with Amazon, and its publishing and tv arms each confirmed curiosity. For the final three years, Boneta and his companions have been concurrently growing the novel and a restricted sequence adaptation.
“As a production company, you hear all the time that you need [intellectual property],” he says. “And the idea was for us to create our own IP.” At this level he enlisted media and content material growth firm Glasstown Leisure to information him by way of the method.
Boneta’s preliminary idea invoked tales about alluring usurpers such because the protagonists in Patricia Highsmith’s “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and the more moderen black comedy “Saltburn.”
“In a bunch of these stories, the con man tends to be the more introverted, quiet, shy guy,” he says. “We’re like, ‘What if we flip this around and we have the con man here be like Jude Law, this bon vivant, outgoing guy. That was one of the first things that we thought of.”
From the onset, Boneta intended to play the lead role of the unnervingly magnetic Julian Villareal in the subsequent on-screen adaptation.
“I really wanted Julian to feel like a chameleon because, as an actor, it’s simply a lot enjoyable to play characters who’re contradicting and complicated,” he says.
The titular Alejandro Velasco is lifeless by suicide earlier than the story begins. The novel follows Julian as he visits the rich Velasco household in San Miguel de Allende with ulterior motives to slowly infiltrate their manicured lives.
“Mexico has a kind of oligarchy, and these families, they care so much about their appearance in society,” Boneta says. “That’s something I’ve never really seen anywhere else in the world. And it’s hard to explain unless you go to Mexico and you live it.”
Particulars about Alejandro’s friendship with Julian, each Mexican college students in the US with a shared ardour for tennis, will finally come into the foreground. Alongside the best way, Julian should confront an opposing pressure: Alejandro’s astute sister, Sofia, a compelling character that Boneta says his personal sister helped him create.
For Boneta, who grew up bilingual — the son of a Mexican father and an American-born mom — straddling the nuances of each cultures and languages got here naturally. He recorded the audiobook model of the novel in English and Spanish.
On each degree, the novel displays elements of Boneta’s life. He grew up visiting kinfolk in San Miguel de Allende — a city now closely gentrified by American immigrants — wishing to sooner or later movie a undertaking on its cobblestone streets. Boneta refers to it as “the Florence of Mexico.”
As for tennis, Boneta believes he wouldn’t be right here if it weren’t for the game. His father performed all through faculty and obtained a scholarship to attend Texas A&M College, the place he met Boneta’s mom at engineering college. Boneta has additionally performed through the years.
“It’s both a mental sport and a cinematic sport,” he says. “I really wanted to have it be woven into the story in a very metaphoric way, where how these characters play tennis, their technique, tells you who they are.”
Going through the clean web page perturbed Boneta at first of his first foray into long-form writing, so he requested his author associates for recommendation. The collective suggestion was to not rush the define, to deal with having a strong basis for the construction and characters.
“We spent a lot of time on that part of the process,” Boneta says. “And it was incredible, once we really had that down, the writing came — I’m not going to say easier — but in a more organic way.”
Deeper into the parallel crafting of the novel and the restricted sequence, Boneta additionally obtained enter from one among his favourite filmmakers, Alfonso Cuarón, who just lately tailored Renée Knight’s novel “Disclaimer” as a restricted sequence for Apple TV+.
“A piece of advice that Alfonso gave me that really helped was, ‘Diego, have each format be its best version for that format. It’s going to be impossible for the show to be exactly like the book, nor should you try to make it,’” Boneta recollects. “‘You have to be open to how maybe some things change in the TV show version because it’s a different format.’”
Boneta sourcing options to skilled obstacles from business veterans he admires evinces a willingness to confess that he’s studying as he goes. One step at a time.
“I’m not going to sit here and call myself an author,” Boneta says with detectable sincerity. “This is my first book, and it’s something that I put a lot of work and heart into. But I’m a storyteller, man, and I realized that the only way I was going to be able to play my dream roles was by creating my dream projects.”
Requested if there’s extra writing in his future, Boneta enthusiastically suggests he’s keen.
“We’ve been approached already about a sequel, and I’m like, ‘What? The book hasn’t even come out yet,’” Boneta says with a chuckle about his prospects as an writer.
