TRUE BLUE

THE FIRST DCU CHARACTER ARRIVES! BLUE BEETLE DIRECTOR ÁNGEL MANUEL SOTO AND STAR XOLO MARIDUEÑA TALK KICKSTARTING A NEW CINEMATIC UNIVERSE

- JACK SHEPHERD

WHEN ÁNGEL MANUEL SOTO MET XOLO Maridueña at Sundance Film Festival, something happened. The director was promoting his impressive coming-of-age story Charm City Kings when his producer introduced him to Cobra Kai's spritely Maridueña. "I saw a really nice, relatable kid," Soto tells SFX. "He had moves, but he also had charisma. The way he expressed himself was very mature, but then you see him laughing and making jokes, and he's a kid who definitely lives in the present."

What Soto didn't realise was that he had been bitten by the Maridueña bug. A year later, the filmmaker was invited by Warner Bros to discuss bringing DC stalwart Blue Beetle to cinemas, and as Soto started reading the superhero's many comics, he couldn't stop thinking about the young man he had met at Sundance.

"He looks exactly like him," he says. "And after meeting his family and everybody involved in his upbringing... I mean, without trying, he already is [the Blue Beetle] Jaime Reyes. He has the martial arts background, he has the same physical attributes, and the way he handles life is not that dissimilar from Jaime. It was an obvious cast. I pushed for him because I couldn't see anybody else. And he delivered."

FAMILY AFFAIR

Anyone uninitiated in Reyes's comic-book past may be wondering why Soto was so intrigued by the actor's family dynamic. After all, it's not normally a necessity for your colleagues to meet your parents. The character of Jaime Reyes, however, is steeped in family. Where Peter Parker and Miles Morales hide their abilities, Reyes does not have a choice: he obtains his powers in front of his entire family.