“It’s a very sexy piece,” said John Leguizamo (Encanto, The Menu) of his gripping new series The Green Veil, which streams exclusively for free on The Network app and website. “It’s very dark. It’s an important piece.”

That it is. The eight-episode TV anthology series, which Leguizamo executive produces with Aram Rappaport, follows a secret government mission to abduct Indigenous children in the 1950s. Based on real-life events, Leguizamo steps into The Green Veil, morphing into one of the more disturbing characters to hit the screen in some time: Agent Gordon Rogers. An immigrant who came into the U.S. — kidnapped as a child, in fact — Gordon’s dedication to achieving the American Dream takes a dire turn and his insidious obsession mounts while he keeps his own self-loathing and heritage repressed.

“He’s a despicable, disgusting, reptilian human being,” Leguizamo says of the character, whom, we first believe, is investigating alien abductions, but real life becomes eerier than sci-fi here. “When I embody a character like that, the hope is, I don’t need people to like me as this character, but I want them to understand how somebody becomes this way. And yeah, it was hard to shake off. At the end of the day, you start acting out in your family, and you start acting in weird ways.”

“I had to isolate myself, because you just can’t control it,” he added. “When it was done, I went on vacation. I was doing anything possible to shake that character off, because it does stay with you for a while, and you have to try to get those thoughts and that darkness out of view.”

In excerpts from an exclusive MovieWeb interview, the ever-outspoken John Leguizamo sounds off about getting this historic series made, Hollywood brouhaha, and becoming socially and politically conscious. Watch our full interview above, and read on.

Launching The Green Veil
The Green Veil (2024) The series follows a government agent in the 1950s tasked with an unraveling secret mission that threatens to expose deeper secrets. John Leguizamo plays Gordon Rogers, an immigrant who came into the US as a child and dedicated his life to achieving the American Dream. He experiences both an insidious obsession with that dream, and the societal limitations to it placed upon certain groups.Release Date April 30, 2024 Cast Irene Bedard , Steven Boyer , Hani Furstenberg , Isabelle Poloner , Marco Torriani , Jessica Marza , Nick Westrate , Anni Krueger Seasons 1 Number of Episodes 8 Streaming Service(s) The Network Expand

Alongside Leguizamo, The Green Veil also stars Hani Furstenberg, John Ortiz, Irene Bedard, and Isabelle Poloner. The sci-fi element — aliens allegedly abducting people in the 1950s — is not as frightening a thought as the reality of the situation. To be sure, Leguizamo has long been outspoken about politics, injustice, Hispanic representation in TV and film, and much more. Which is why The Green Veil appealed to him.

“Aram Rappaport, the creator of this series, told me that he’d been doing some research and bumped into the fact that in the 1950s, the U.S. government was involved in taking Native American children from their homes, and putting them up for adoption with white families so they could inherit the land, and they would give it to oil companies or other corporations. And I was like, ‘Wait a minute. What? How is this possible?’”

“So when we started creating this series,” added Leguizamo, “I was like, ‘I’m in! I want to be a part of this because this story needs to be told.'”

Nobody Wanted to Greenlight the Series
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Initially, Rappaport and Leguizamo approached all the streamers, from Netflix to Amazon. Execs loved the premise but were hesitant to take it on. Were they afraid due to the subject? “Well, let’s say that,” Leguizamo shares. “I mean, we went to every streamer in Hollywood, and everyone — they all loved it. They made a lot of offers to Aram to direct other things, but not this show. And it just goes to the symptoms of Hollywood.” He added:

There’s a lot of talk of inclusion and equity and parity, but is it really happening? Because this [series] has Native American subject matter. It was a Latin lead… a dark subject matter. I mean, they couldn’t do it.

“It’s so trippy to me that we had to create our own platform, The Network… and it’s free, and if you’re like me, anything free is the best that could be,” continued Leguizamo. “But yeah, it’s so crazy. I mean, we Latin people are 20 percent of the population. We over index at the U.S. box office. We’re almost a third of subscribers on streamers, almost a third of sports fans and less than 6% of the leads.”

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He went on to say that the issue is not just parity. “White people are 58.9% of the population and yet 100% of the executives, I would say. The majority of the stories, the majority of the leads. Things are not fair. It’s just not.”

John Leguizamo Became Socially Conscious When He Started to Audition
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Leguizamo’s passion for acting stems back to childhood. He’d eventually go on to deliver stand-out performances in films like Carlito’s Way, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything Julie Newmar, Executive Decision, Moulin Rouge, Ice Age, The Menu, and, of course, voicing Bruno in the smash hit, Encanto. Was he also outspoken politically? “I was always socially conscious,” he said. “I was just not aware of what was going on. I was a young man, I was very idealistic, I believed in a meritocracy. And slowly, that bubble burst.” He went on to add:

“You know, I was at NYU.
I was with D.B. Sweeney and Andrew McCarthy in the same class
, and I’d see that they would go to like five to 10 auditions a day, and I would go to one every five months for a drug dealer or a villain of some kind of character that died in the first few minutes of the movie. And I realized that
no matter how much I studied, no matter how much I worked on myself, I would never have the same opportunities as them
.”

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In terms of the casting breakdown back then, some 40 years ago, he added: “It was like Jim Crow. They would be like ‘white actor, white doctor, white lawyer,’ and eventually, every five months, you’d see ‘Latin drug dealer.’ I’d ask my agent, ‘Please, can I go there and do my American Buffalo monologue? Can I do my Charlie Brown comedy monologue?’ And they wouldn’t see you. They wouldn’t see you no matter what you did because that’s the way things were.”

He soon realized, “Oh wow, it’s not gonna be fair. It’s never gonna be fair. But I was able to turn it into good because I said, ‘Hollywood isn’t for me. They’re never gonna be.’ So, I didn’t buy into it. I never did. I started writing my own stuff and realized that I had to come up with my own opportunities.” He adds:

There’s a huge Latin audience out there and white people and black people who love Latin content, so yeah… Look at
Encanto —
the No. 1 Disney movie in its history. All Latin cast and Latin created There are people who love Latin content.

Dive into The Green Veil on The Network app. Watch the trailer below.