ELLE Magazine

When @diego Boneta's friends heard he would take on the challenge of playing authoritarian leader, Fidel Castro, onscreen, they were adamant: “Don’t play Fidel. It’s way too risky. He’s our Hitler. Don’t do it.” The actor had been cast in the film ‘Killing Castro,’ which also stars Al Pacino and premiered at the Tribeca Festival this summer. But despite the warnings—or maybe because of them—Boneta did it anyway.

American audiences might know Boneta for playing lighter roles in 2012’s ‘Rock of Ages’ or in 2015’s ‘Scream Queens,’ but the Mexican heartthrob was excited by the challenge of embodying the Communist dictator with a complicated history. And given that he's no stranger to playing real-life characters (he last starred as the Mexican singer Luis Miguel in the hit Netflix series of the same name), he understood the responsibility of the role in front of him. “From the very beginning, I knew what this meant—how serious it was for what Fidel represents,” he says. “It’s the biggest challenge I’ve ever had as an actor, and also the most rewarding one. But I didn’t know that when I first decided to jump in.”

For Hispanic Heritage Month, Boneta sat down with ELLE to talk about the acting, history, and dialect training he underwent to channel the Cuban dictator. Read the full interview at the link in bio.