Interview: Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer

A conversation with the screenwriters of the movie Blue Beetle.

From Creative Screenwriting:

“I first became attached to Blue Beetle in 2018 through producers Zev Foreman and Galen Vaisman,” recalls Mexican-American screenwriter Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer (Contrapelo, Miss Bala). The producers offered the Blue Beetle comics to Dunnet-Alcocer to adapt into a feature screenplay if they sparked his imagination.

Excited by the challenge, the screenwriter took a dive into the world of Blue Beetle as Jamie Reyes, previously inhabited by Ted Lord and Dan Garrett. The producers didn’t give him a specific brief, but instead, asked him for his take on Blue Beetle. The screenwriter focused on Jaime’s tightly-knit Latino family. Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer notes that his version of Blue Beetle tonally feels like a John Hughes movie. It may well be based on Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

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“We gave Jaime a wonderful sense of humor and we make him very fallible,” remarks Dunnet-Alcocer. Most notably, “it is another vision of America, another future of America, which is now portrayed by a Mexican-American young man.”

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Gareth Dunnet-Alcocer likened Jaime Reyes to Peter Parker, a white kid from Queens who gets stung by a spider and becomes Spider-Man. His first instinct is to hide his newly-found powers from his family.

“But if you’re Mexican, good luck,” jokes the screenwriter. “It’s impossible because everybody is on top of each other in a wonderful way. Family really is important. Your family is going to be around you and glued to you whether you like it or not. This can be a wonderful thing, this can be a negative thing, but it’s a Mexican thing. Whether it’s a horror story or it’s a fun story, your family is trapped with you, and you’re trapped with your family.”

A trailer for Blue Beetle:

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