On Thursday, MLW CEO Court Bauer spoke with POST Wrestling about the reveal of the former Dario Cueto of Lucha Underground as “El Jefe” and the man behind the Azteca Underground group on MLW programming.
Bauer spoke with POST about the process of shooting the scene with actor Luis Fernandez-Gil and adjustments they will have to make regarding the name of the character for MLW usage:
Whether you go from Nash and Hall, who were Razor Ramon and Diesel, to WCW, sometimes you have to make some IP adjustments and so that’s what we’ll do here with this. His new name, which I will hold on telling you what it is, but it might leak because these things just end up getting out. But he will have a new name, but it will be very true in spirit to the person and mischief and chaos and violence he conjured up elsewhere.
Bauer also revealed details of the shoot with Gil that occurred last month in Burbank, California along with the lengths that MLW went to preserve the secret of Gil’s involvement until Wednesday’s season finale:
It was a fascinating process to go through just shooting that scene alone. We shot some other stuff and continue to over the course of the next few months. We’re shooting everything on skeleton crews because of the pandemic, even though people are vaccinated, we just want to try and do what we can to minimize risk. So, we shot that in Burbank almost a month ago and we had everyone – the cinematographers, sound guys, PA’s, you name it, they all signed NDAs. Everyone has non-disclosures because I wanted this to be as tight of a shoot as possible. People look at the end of season two of ‘The Mandalorian’ with Luke Skywalker – like no one knew the surprise – they taped it a year in advance or something and it really was a skeleton crew and that’s, kind of, in the same spirit as what we did. I saw that and thought, that’s exactly how I want this. I want this airtight.
People were probably like, “Okay, we’re connecting the dots, this is who it is” but until you see it, you don’t know if you’re going to get that payoff. We wanted people guessing, we wanted people wondering and we wanted the element of surprise for the creative and the reveal. It was a lot of fun, Luis (Fernandez-Gil) is fantastic to work with and we’re thrilled to have closed a deal with him to be with us for many years to come.
The full interview with Court Bauer can be downloaded on all podcast platforms and streamed on YouTube.
