Kate del Castillo

Televisa made her a lead at nineteen. Del Castillo broke through in the 1991 telenovela Muchachitas and spent the following decade at the top of that industry, carrying Alguna vez tendremos alas, La Mentira, Ramona and Bajo la misma piel, which in the Mexican system means shooting enormous volumes of television with the whole country watching every night.

The role that changed the shape of her career came later. As Teresa Mendoza in La Reina del Sur she plays a woman pushed into a business she never chose and then discovering she is frighteningly good at it. The series ran from 2011 to 2023 and made her a pan-American star rather than a Mexican one. Ingobernable, where she is a first lady on the run, works the same ground with more politics in it.

Hollywood has used her less imaginatively, mostly as the dangerous woman: Isabel Aretas in Bad Boys for Life, La Hembra in El Chicano, the title role in Hunting Ava Bravo. The exceptions are worth finding. Under the Same Moon and Trade are migration dramas that ask her to play ordinary desperation instead of glamour. And her voice work may quietly be the best of her English-language credits, twice cast as a ruler of the dead: La Muerte in The Book of Life and Lady Micte in Maya and the Three, both of which give her more character to play than most of her live-action American parts have.