Héctor Kotsifakis built his performance in La Captura around real audio involving El Cholo Ivan and Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. He listened before the film’s release, and the recordings gave him a way to play the character without turning him into a myth.
The actor said the material helped him avoid both a heroic varnish and a cartoon villain. That push and pull sits at the center of La Captura, which presents Guzmán through a harsher, less reverent lens than narco stories that lean on glamour.
La Captura and the recordings
Kotsifakis plays Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán in La Captura. He said he listened to recordings of Guzmán speaking with El Cholo Iván, and those tapes also included conversations about drug shipments.
He described the process in blunt terms: "Me enfoqué en las partes del ser humano que hay detrás de de ese icono". That approach matters here because the recordings did not give him a single-note character; they gave him contradictions to work with, including a man who, in his own view, believed he was doing his work correctly.
Héctor Kotsifakis and El Cholo Iván
Kotsifakis said, "Ahí veo cosas de él que realmente me dieron mucho material de trabajo, en donde él no se considera una mala persona. Él está haciendo su trabajo de una manera correcta desde su perspectiva". In practice, that meant treating the audio as behavioral evidence: rhythm, confidence, and self-justification, not just dialogue.
He also said he did not want to create an aspirational character that would feed the narco myth, and he rejected a flat monster or a simplistic villain caricature. That is the sharper choice in a project like La Captura, because the performance has to carry the weight of a real figure without selling him as a legend.
Torreón to Netflix
Kotsifakis was born in Torreón and has more than two decades of experience in theater, film, and television. He has appeared in Malverde: el santo patrón, Los Gringo Hunters, Pedro Páramo, and Santita, which gives him the kind of range La Captura seems to depend on when a role requires restraint more than imitation.
For viewers, the useful question now is not whether the film leans into notoriety, but how much of the performance is built from those recordings with El Cholo Iván. If La Captura keeps that distance from glorification, Kotsifakis’s preparation becomes the film’s strongest argument for treating Guzmán as a subject, not a symbol.
