Most people hit snooze when their alarm goes off at 3:30 a.m. Not “Blue Beetle” star Xolo Maridueña, who leaped out of bed each day so he could head to set and begin the hourlong process of donning his superhero suit.
“This is not like getting ready for school in the morning,” Maridueña thought when he first put on the electric blue and gunmetal-hued costume. But it was just as the actors who’ve come before him described their comic book movie experience: With the suit on, his posture straightened, and he was transformed from mere mortal to superhero.
“I could feel the suit hugging me. I could feel the pinchers on my sides,” he adds. “Honestly, it’s pretty comfortable. I hear that they only get better as the years go on — more easily accessible to go to the bathroom.”
Not only did the practical suit look and feel great, but it also assuaged the young actor’s fears that superhero movies were “found on the green screen.” That idea made him nervous. “I didn’t consider myself as someone who shines in a space where I had to do a lot of imagining,” he explains. “With ‘Cobra Kai,’ I love that we get to do the stunts and be immersed in the world, but, with this movie, we were on a green screen for like two days. So much of it was tangible.”
As for the physical transformation, Maridueña jokes that he weighed “90 pounds with a wet T-shirt on” before he was cast, so he prepared to slip on the spandex by hitting the gym. He bulked up to about 130, then added 25 to 30 pounds of muscle by lifting weights and doing martial arts. “A lot of it was just eating the right amount,” he says.
In “Blue Beetle,” Maridueña plays Jaime Reyes, a recent college graduate who gains superpowers when an alien scarab latches on to him. It’s a historic role, as Jaime is the first Latino superhero to lead a stand-alone film in the DC cinematic universe.
“We didn’t walk on the set the first day like, ‘We’re about to make the best Latino superhero movie ever.’ We set out to make a great superhero movie that’s filled with a Latino cast,” says Maridueña, who is of Mexican, Cuban, and Ecuadorian heritage.
He shouts out the film’s director Ángel Manuel Soto and writer Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer for serving as the foundation for the project’s mission. “They knew the story they’re trying to tell because they’ve lived it and experienced it firsthand,” he says. “Once that soil was really healthy, it couldn’t help but feel natural and inherent the rest of the way because it was an unspoken thing.”
Xolo Maridueña as Jaime Reyes in “Blue Beetle.” Warner Bros.
When we meet at a café in downtown Los Angeles in mid-July, Maridueña excitedly announces that he’s ordered fries for the table. The L.A. native beat me to the restaurant amid a whirlwind day of promotion in the final hours before the actors union joined the screenwriters guild on the picket lines. It’s a dramatic time in the industry, one that may overshadow Maridueña’s movie star moment, where the whole world will learn his name and how to pronounce it. (“Show-low,” he notes.)
But before all that, Maridueña is psyched for our sit-down, which marks one of his first major magazine profiles. “It reminds me of Cousin Greg messing up and not realizing he’s on the record,” he says, referencing a scene from one of his favorite shows, HBO’s “Succession,” as he grabs a few shoestring spuds.
He’s kidding, but Maridueña is selling himself short. He’s no bumbling newbie like Nicholas Braun’s Greg. In fact, he began acting professionally at 10, appearing on “Parenthood” and then kicking ass on “Cobra Kai” since he was 16. But “Blue Beetle” is his biggest break yet: not only his first time as No. 1 on the call sheet but also his first movie role, period. Predictably, it didn’t take long for the imposter syndrome to set in after Soto cast him in the part.
“I didn’t audition for this. How do they know that I’m the right person?” Maridueña remembers thinking. “But I had a wonderful conversation with my acting coach, who said, ‘All this nervousness is your ego. The point of this movie isn’t to make you the biggest star. This movie is to make people feel seen. It’s larger than you.’”
That reality check took a lot of the pressure off the young actor’s shoulders. “It made me realize my job is to be 100% prepared and then everything else will fall into place,” he says, offering the type of thoughtful response I’d come to recognize as his signature over our hour-long conversation.
Aside from the double strike, Maridueña’s facing another hurdle. Recent DC titles “Black Adam,” “Shazam! Fury of the Gods” and “The Flash” all flopped at the box office. Does he feel pressure for “Blue Beetle” to be a blockbuster?
“I’m sure for Warner Bros., there’s pressure,” he quips, then shakes his head as if chastising himself. “That sounded a little snarky.”
Maridueña recalibrates: “Yes, of course, I want this to be the biggest movie of all time. And I truly feel like it is a worldwide movie. I think it should be a box office smash, but at the same time, there’s box office smashes that aren’t the best [movies], and vice versa. I don’t want to be a prisoner to the numbers.”
It certainly helps that DC Studios co-chiefs James Gunn and Peter Safran have committed to Maridueña as Jaime Reyes/Blue Beetle for the foreseeable future, confirming that he is set to appear in upcoming films.
“What I was most impressed by is his ability with both the comedic and the emotional material,” Safran tells Variety. “He has all the skills.”
Safran explains that the role called for a deftness in “unbelievably funny physical comedy” as Jaime learns how to navigate his new superpowers, as well as a depth and gravitas since the character is driven by a desire to save his family. Maridueña nailed both. “It’s just very evident that this is a star-making performance,” Safran adds.
Maridueña’s thrilled at the prospect of continuing in the DCU. “Regardless of if we get 20 movies or if it’s just this one, I feel truly fulfilled,” he says. “If we get to do another one, I’m so ready — and shit, I’ll put on another 20 pounds and get even bigger.”
He is aware, though, that he was 21 years old the first time around, so the transformation might get a little tougher. “It’s made me start to realize that I have to enjoy working out,” he says knowingly. “I’m not trying to eat steamed rice and broccoli and chicken for 48 years. I want to eat the food of my people as well.”
Xolo Maridueña on the set of “Blue Beetle.” Warner Bros./Hopper Stone/SMPSP & DC Comics
Maridueña is newly 22 and had a birthday celebration to remember: On June 9, he and his family watched the finished cut of “Blue Beetle” for the first time.
“I had to watch it a second time, because the first time I was just so…” he begins, searching for the right word to describe the feeling. “It’s crazy having months of your life boiled down into two hours.”
Moviemaking is a markedly different experience from shooting “Cobra Kai,” where he’s had five seasons to “build a character from the ground up and experiment.” Filming “Blue Beetle” was more like being hitched to a rocket ship, with the “exhilarating” family screening as the equivalent of breaking through the atmosphere and safely into space. It also brought the “Blue Beetle” journey full circle.
Maridueña got the news that he’d booked the role over dinner with Soto and the film’s producers in summer 2021. After he “took a few minutes to cry,” he said, “I have to call my mom.” Soto recently shared video of the tearful conversation on social media, which immediately went viral.
“They said, ‘Well sure, we’d love to tell your mom. But you’re going to tell her in front of us so that we make sure that she’s the only person that you tell,’” he recalls, laughing at the tension between the emotional, life-changing call and how seriously DC takes spoilers.
Then, on June 9, 2022, he was on set, spending his 21st birthday filming Jaime’s first transformation into his superhero alter ego. “There’s a line where Jaime’s like, ‘Mom, I’m 22. C’mon, you’ve gotta let me spread my wings,’ so it was very surreal,” Maridueña recalls.
Exactly a year later, he sat in a screening room with him family taking in the special movie night — even though he didn’t warn his mom that she’d see her son’s bare butt on the big screen. “After the suit redeploys, there’s a quick scene where I am completely naked,” he says, chuckling again. “They were definitely very surprised.”
With the release still months away, Maridueña couldn’t yet know what critics or audiences would make of the movie, so he was relieved to find that his parents were moved.
“It’s really wonderful to have my family feel represented,” he says. “That’s what all great movies do — regardless of ethnicity, movies transcend all those labels. When you’re able to connect with someone, it means more than just cinema.”
From the dialogue to the soundtrack, the film was infused with cultural references that felt authentic to their experiences. “I grew up having dinner put on the table and not calling it Mexican food; it was just dinner,” he explains. “Something that helped tell this story is that being Latino doesn’t mean one thing; there’s so many languages that we speak and backgrounds that we come from. Getting to celebrate that in this movie opens up our stories in a way that we haven’t seen before.”
Elpidia Carrillo (as Rocio), George Lopez (as Uncle Rudy), Xolo Maridueña (as Jaime Reyes), Belissa Escobedo (as Milagro) and Damian Alcazar (as Alberto) in “Blue Beetle”
He hopes “Blue Beetle” will have the same effect on audiences that watching Will Smith in “Men in Black” had on him. Maridueña wasn’t born in 1997 when the movie dominated the box office, but even as a kid, seeing a Black man in a leading role made an impression.
“Will Smith was so charismatic in that movie,” he says of Smith’s Agent J. “Nobody had to explain why Will Smith was the character that he was; he was a badass and there wasn’t anything spoken about it. That soaked in.”
The sci-fi blockbuster had been on his parents’ watchlist as part of their intention to school their children on the power of representation in media. “They made a decision to have me bear witness to diversity,” he explains. “They wanted to make sure that I understood that inclusivity was important and necessary. As artists themselves, they understood not feeling welcomed.”
Maridueña has had his own journey navigating his Latino heritage in Hollywood and beyond. In June, he sat on a panel at CAA Amplify with his “Blue Beetle” costar Becky G, the Mexican American singer-turned-actor who voices Khaji-Da, an alien who controls the scarab. During the conversation, she dropped some knowledge that shifted his whole perspective.
“What she said was, ‘I am 200%,’ meaning ‘I’m 100% American and 100% Latina,’” he recalls. “Honestly, I’d grown up most of my life thinking I was 50-50. I was a black sheep of the Americans because I was Latino, and I would go to Mexico and be called whatever because I ‘wasn’t Mexican.’” He wouldn’t quite consider it an identity crisis, but admits that it was hard to know where he belonged. “Her words hit me. Shoutout to Becky, because that comment totally changed my life.”
Navigating the business as a “kid-adult” presented another set of challenges, Maridueña admits, but he’s been successful thanks to a core value instilled by his mother.
“She told me, ‘Look, I don’t need to raise you to be the smartest person or the strongest person; I need to make sure that you’re not a dick,’” he recalls. “It really resonated with me that we should lead our lives in a way that exhibits empathy and love. I’m constantly reminded there is value in being a good person.”
With production for the final season of “Cobra Kai” also on hold until the strikes end, Maridueña is keeping busy with other artistic endeavors. He shoots photography on the side and he’s about to release his first single, titled “On My Way.” Fans got a preview of Maridueña’s flow when he performed a blistering freestyle on Sway’s Sirius XM radio show in June, but he’s been working on this “passion project,” which he’ll release independently, for a while now.
“I’m not trying to take over the world; it’s not a cash grab. I love making music that makes me feel happy, although it is a little bit more vulnerable,” he says, comparing rapping to acting. “The stakes are so much higher, and it makes it so much more rewarding when we’re writing these bars.”
The new track samples A Tribe Called Quest’s classic “Can I Kick It?” and debuts Friday, coinciding with the launch of “Blue Beetle” in theaters. The DC superhero movie will open in 3,850 venues, including some Imax screens and is projected to best WB’s billion dollar blockbuster “Barbie” at the box office targeting $25 million to $32 million in its debut.
So while Maridueña may not be aiming for world domination, it just might happen anyway.
About stepping into the spotlight, he says, “It’s taken my whole life to prepare me for this moment, and I do feel ready.”
Additional reporting by Clayton Davis
Xolo Maridueña with director Ángel Manuel Soto on the set of “Blue Beetle.” Warner Bros./Hopper Stone/SMPSP & DC Comics
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