own word

For those who know of the spectacle that is Juan Gabriel there is no explanation necessary, for those who don’t, no explanation will suffice.

A new Netflix docuseries attempts to capture the magic of the frequently bedazzled genre- and gender-defying showmanship of “El Divo de Juárez,” who died at 66 of natural causes in 2016, while also investigating the internality of the man behind Gabriel — Alberto Aguilera Valadez.

Juan Gabriel was known for his epic stage performances, where he was often accompanied by an orchestra, dancers and dozens of mariachis dressed in tight jackets and sombreros, while belting out such hits as “Hasta Que Te Conocí,” “El Noa Noa” and “Amor Eterno.”

His colorful outfits and flamboyant dance moves drew speculation about his sexuality, but he famously preferred to remain coy on the issue and to this day remains a queer icon throughout the Latin American world.

“Juan Gabriel: I Must, I Can, I Will,” which premieres Oct. 30, utilizes a goldmine of hundreds of thousands of personal and never-before-seen voice recordings, photos and videos of one of Mexico’s most revered singer-songwriters, giving audiences a holistic look at the pain, joy, contradictions, artistry and genius that informed Gabriel’s worldview and perception of himself.

The project is director María José Cuevas’ second production with the streaming giant — her 2023 documentary feature “The Lady of Silence: The Mataviejitas Murders” recounted the story of famous Mexican serial killer Juana Barraza, who was sentenced to 759 years in prison for killing 16 elderly women and the suspected killing of dozens more.

Cuevas’ implementation of the juxtaposed duality of Juan Gabriel and Alberto Aguilera Valadez was inspired by his insistence that the two entities were distinct yet symbiotic, as was shown in a 2014 filmed self-interview the singer conducted.

“In order to understand the greatness of Juan Gabriel, I had to know Alberto. He always played with that duality,” she said. “From a very young age he would say in interviews that he invented Juan Gabriel to shield Alberto, he invented an idol in order to protect his private identity.”

In an interview with The Times, Cuevas spoke about her personal connection to the famed singer, the overwhelming archives she had access to and the ways in which Juan Gabriel united and continues to unite people to this day.

This interview was translated and edited for length.

What was your relationship to Juan Gabriel before taking on the task of directing this documentary?

I remember clearly turning on the TV [when I was young] and seeing video clips of Juan Gabriel with his red sweater and white jeans. I later had the opportunity to go to his first performance at the Palacios de Bellas Artes in 1990 with my parents. One is accustomed to going to Bellas Artes for opera, ballet, classical music and the concert began with that formal tone, but there reached a moment where audience members couldn’t keep up the facade of elegance and everyone let their hair down.

For me that moment was incredibly revelatory, I finally noticed that he was a whirlwind in every sense of the word. I didn’t realize at the time that I was present at a such an important cultural milestone. When I watched it in retrospect, from all the camera angles we were privy to for this documentary, I got goosebumps and I wish I could go back to being 18 years old and experience it with the intensity that I have for his music now.

I think that Juan Gabriel always transports us to something personal, but also to something collective. In Mexico, Juan Gabriel’s death was a very collective experience. You would go out into the street and you would hear his music in cars, the corner store, coming out of neighbors’ houses.

How did you gain access to the vast collection of archived materials that are present in the documentary?

That’s really the treasure of the project. Juan Gabriel’s story has already been told, but what makes this project unique is that it’s a story told by [the recordings and photos] he left behind. One of the first things he did after reaching success wasn’t just to buy his mom a house, but also to buy himself a Super 8 camera. From then on he picked up the habit of recording his everyday activities as Alberto Aguilera and later on he always had a camera following around as Juan Gabriel.

From our first meetings with Netflix, I figured we should ask Gabriel’s family if they had anything to share with us. I thought maybe it would be a photo album that was laying around, maybe a box of memorabilia or a few cassettes. So it was to our great surprises when they sent us over a photo of a warehouse with shelves full of every different kind of film. It was crazy. And that’s when I remembered that Juan Gabriel’s close friend and actor Isela Vega was helping him catalog all of his videography.

I never imagined that within those videos that we’d find the public persona of Juan Gabriel and the private persona of Alberto Aguilera. Another elucidating moment was that Juan Gabriel reached a moment where he became conscious of the level of his celebrity and that it wasn’t a coincidence that he recorded most of his life. And there reached a moment where I realized he saved all these recordings so that one day people could revisit all his saved materials and they could reconstruct his personal story through what he left behind.

There’s a moment in the documentary where we’re at one of his concerts and there are men of all orientations in the crowd that are asking JuanGa to marry them. That seemed particularly powerful to me because in that moment the veil of machismo seemed to fall.

Yeah, I think an important part of making this portrait of Juan Gabriel was understanding the context of Mexico in the ‘80s. It was very conservative, very machista and then all of a sudden this guy drops in with all this talent and charisma and he says, “Here I come, get out of the way because I’m gonna conquer everyone.” And that wasn’t so simple at that time. He showed his greatness at any and every stage he was put on. He was able to win over people in every social class in a very elitist Mexico. He won over everyone from the most macho man to women.

Even greater than the achievement that was his performance at Bellas Artes were his performances in palenques when he was young. Palenques being these circular stages where you can’t hide because you’re standing right in the middle of everything. And he would take the stage late at night when everyone was already drunk and they were audiences that were, in general, very machista.

Suddenly a very young Juan Gabriel would appear to perform rancheras. I always say he was a provocateur, but also a seducer because of his ability to win over a crowd. There were audiences that would yell derogatory things at him and that’s when he’d really play with the audience.

It feels almost impossible not to be moved by the music as you watch your documentary.

He’s really magnificent. I remember throughout the whole process of making the doc and I was watching the intimate home videos of Alberto Aguilera and it really reminded me that Juan Gabriel was a human like everyone else [not just this grand entertainer]. I’d put any concert of his and I was bowing at the altar of a star. It’s amazing what a powerful character he was up on that stage.

And how have you seen JuanGa’s legacy represent something very specific in the U.S.?

For Latinos in the U.S. he’s such an important figure because his work pulls people back to their roots. One of his greatest accomplishments as a performer was when he filled the Rose Bowl in 1993. In that moment he showed his influence and strength within the Latino world. He’s absolutely one of the key figures in Latin music.

There are very few recorded interviews with Dame Agatha Christie, the world’s bestselling novelist and generally acknowledged doyenne of crime, for one simple reason: She hated speaking in public.

She often described herself as cripplingly shy — she agonized for days when a celebration for the 10th anniversary of her play “The Mousetrap” required her to give a speech — and she remained morbidly press-adverse after the media swarm that followed her famous 11-day disappearance. (Though in defense of the press, what could one expect when a notable crime writer goes missing for almost two weeks in the midst of a shattering divorce and then, when found, refuses to explain what had happened?)

In her autobiography, and through her literary avatar Ariadne Oliver, Christie often described taking great pains to avoid speaking in front of people and she (and Mrs. Oliver) particularly hated being asked questions about her writing. “I never know what to say,” Mrs. Oliver would wail, echoing sentiments expressed by Christie herself.

So when BBC Maestro announced, at the end of April, that it was launching a digital class in which an AI-resurrected Christie would offer lessons in writing, it was difficult not to be outraged. Never mind the whole “I see dead people”-ness of it all; here was a woman who was on record, multiple times and often at great length, about how much she loathed having to talk about how she did what she did in front of a bunch of people.

The creators of the series clearly anticipated such outrage. The prologue to the course features BBC Maestro Chief Executive Michael Levine and Christie’s great-grandson James Prichard, chairman and CEO of Agatha Christie Ltd., explaining the care put into the series. The script, we are assured, is rigorously based on Christie’s own words; the actor (Vivien Keene) was chosen after a year-and-a-half search; and the set (a library that houses a model of Christie’s own typewriter), the costume (a tweed suit accented by pearls, a brooch and duplicates of Christie’s engagement and wedding rings) and the hair are models of authenticity.

More important, the course has the family’s full support. “At the heart of this project was my father who knew Agatha Christie better than any person living,” Prichard says. “At times he was astounded by how similar to his grandmother this version was. And my view,” he adds with a mildly challenging air, “is that if he can enjoy this project, we can all enjoy it.”

Agatha Christie autographing French editions of her books, circa 1950.

(Hulton Archive / Getty Images)

Challenge accepted.

Keeping in mind Christie’s fascination with disguise and advanced technology, as well as a passage in her autobiography in which she wishes a friend with more confidence could step in as a substitute during author interviews, I put my fears aside and ponied up $89 for the two-and-a-half-hour class.

Which is so respectful I found myself, at more than a few points in the 12 sections, wanting to scream.

We meet Keene’s Christie behind a desk, and there she stays, smiling and nodding as she walks us through her thoughts on her craft (including, in the introduction, her aversion to offering them).

Christie’s autobiography is a doorstop. Thoughts about writing, her characters and her career run through it, but they rarely take up more than two consecutive pages. Christie historian Mark Aldridge has done a remarkable job of mining it, as well as other writings, to create a genuine tutorial with an admirable script.

Yes, Christie offers the typical anodyne advice — write what you know and the type of book you enjoy reading — but she also gets very granular. A murder mystery is best at 50,000 words, the murderer and important clues must be introduced very early on, settings should be described thoroughly but economically (“sometimes a map works best”) and one must never give into an editor who spells cocoa as “coco.”

In portions that include “characters,” “plots,” “settings” and “clues,” Christie assesses some of her work. She came to think that her first book, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles,” was over-stuffed with plot, but remained irritated by those who claimed that the twist in “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd” was a cheat. She wished she had introduced Hercule Poirot as a younger man, and was very happy to ditch Hastings for a while.

She discusses the importance of observation in everyday life, describing, among other things, how an encounter in front of a shop window led to one of her Parker Pyne stories, as well as the usefulness of isolated settings (“snow can also weigh down telephone wires”) and second (or third) murders.

In the opening minutes, it’s kind of neat to see what looks very much like a midlife Christie, smiling and talking in her very British way (the voice is not precise but close enough).

Still, there is no getting away from the fact that this is a two-and-a-half-hour lecture, delivered by a woman sitting behind a desk who, with the exception of a very few hand gestures, never moves. The camera moves, shooting her from this angle and that, and occasionally roving over various covers of Christie’s books. But Christie’s body remains as still as the late Queen Elizabeth II delivering her Christmas address.

I began to feel quite concerned for Keene — just how long were these takes? She delivers a vocally expressive performance and gives the digitally recreated face the necessary intelligence, wit and kindliness. The face itself looked fine — a bit glowy at times and immobile around the eyes — but its novelty quickly wore off. I would have happily traded what is essentially a parlor trick for a Christie who would get up and walk around a bit. Have a cup of tea, flip through a notebook.

Actor Vivien Keene’s voice and face were altered to create Agatha Christie’s likeness.

(BBC Maestro)

I realize that it is a course, and one I did not have to go through in one sitting. But as the first hour slid into the second, I found myself longing for someone, Aldridge perhaps, to mine Christie’s exquisite autobiography more broadly and create an entire one-woman play. An evening with Agatha, free of AI, in which Christie could reminisce about her extraordinary life, from her glorious Victorian childhood to her later years as an archaeologist.

Though known as the creator of the manor-house murder story, Christie was, as her books indicate, a voracious world traveler, learning how to surf before surfing was a thing, and dealing with adventures and misadventures (including a 14-hour honeymoon trek by camel and a hideous case of bed bugs on the Orient Express) that would give even the most intrepid travel influencer pause.

She lived through two world wars, experienced wildly unexpected success and deep personal loss. She endured a heartbreaking divorce and a nervous breakdown, while raising a daughter and writing books, only to rally again and find love again in the most unexpected place.

She wasn’t a saint — her work occasionally includes the racist, antisemitic and classist tropes of its time — but she avowed fascism as often as her more political contemporaries and believed, as she says in the course, that she lived in contract with her readers for whom she had the utmost respect.

She was a celebrity who never behaved as a celebrity, an artist who never admitted to art (and wrote her books on any steady surface, including orange crates and washstands), a novelist like no other who also wrote the longest-running play in history and whose work continues to sell while being adapted in film and television. Her contribution to the culture is literally incalculable.

So surely she deserves more than a course that makes news mainly because of its use of dreaded AI. She’s Agatha-freaking-Christie. Give her a movie, a miniseries, a play. Give her an actor who worries less about the face and more about the words, and the life that inspired them.