Alfonso Herrera's Facing El Chapo has turned into an unexpected global phenomenon. The film climbed to No. 1 on Netflix's worldwide movie rankings, taking a story rooted deeply in Mexico and carrying it far beyond its natural audience. For the Mexican artist and the team behind the film, the scale of the response was difficult to anticipate.
What began as a tense retelling of the operation that led two federal police officers to Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán has connected with viewers around the world, giving Herrera one of the most remarkable successes of his career just as he turns 43. "None of us could have predicted this. It was a total suprise," he told this reporter during an interview. "This is huge for Mexican films."
Poncho, as his fans call him, has spent more than two decades moving between Mexican pop culture phenomenon RBD, challenging historical dramas, Hollywood series and some of Netflix and Prime Video's most ambitious Spanish-language productions. But his latest role has placed him at the center of a different kind of global conversation.
In Netflix's Facing El Chapo, released in Spanish as La Captura, Herrera plays federal police officer Arturo Carmona, one of two men who unexpectedly come face-to-face with Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán after what appears to be a routine stop of a stolen vehicle in Sinaloa.
The film, directed by Chava Cartas and written by Bernardo Esquinca, is inspired by the real events of January 8, 2016, when Mexican Marines launched Operation Black Swan in Los Mochis, Sinaloa, to recapture Guzmán following his July 2015 escape from the maximum-security Altiplano prison.
After the initial raid, Guzmán and his security chief, Jorge Iván "El Cholo" Gastélum, fled through a tunnel and escaped in a stolen vehicle. The men were later intercepted by federal police officers and held while authorities moved to secure the arrest. The real operation involved multiple officers and military forces, while the Netflix film fictionalizes and condenses events around Carmona and his partner Héctor Rosales, played by Noé Hernández.
That perspective is the key to Facing El Chapo. Rather than revisit the mythology of the Sinaloa Cartel leader, the thriller focuses on the fear, uncertainty and moral pressure facing officers who suddenly have one of the world's most wanted fugitives in their custody.
"It is the story of two police officers who did their job correctly, who did their job honorably," Herrera told this reporter. "That is very interesting, especially in the country where we live in, because we cannot romanticize things, cover up the sun with one finger or be naïve."
In Facing El Chapo, he shares the screen with Hernández, known for Prison Cell 211, while Héctor Kotsifakis plays Guzmán and Juan Pablo Cruz García portrays Gastélum. Paola Fernández co-stars as Isaura Carmona, Arturo's wife, one of several characters who makes clear that the danger surrounding the officers extends well beyond the road where the arrest begins.
The pressure peaks inside a motel room, where Carmona must keep control of the situation while facing the possibility that help may not arrive, or may not be trustworthy. Herrera said the sequence, which has emerged as one of the film's most intense, required an unusually long and evolving process.
"We filmed that sequence for four days," he said. "When we finished, I walked out of that hotel room and it was like oxygenating, like breathing. It was as if I had been under water for three minutes."
The cast and creative team had spent about a month and a half working on the scene before production, rereading and rewriting it repeatedly. Yet the work continued when they arrived on set.
"We changed it on set and we were still in the search," Herrera said. "When we finished, it was like breathing again."
For the actor, the room works because the fear is larger than the man sitting across from Carmona. The officers do not know whether they can rely on their own institutions, a doubt that turns the thriller into a story about survival within a compromised system.
"The suspense and the action thriller work because of the doubts they can have about each other," Herrera said. "We have to be clear and conscious about the institutions and the corporations that provide us with security, and they themselves doubt their own corporations."
The project also reunited Herrera with Cartas, a filmmaker with whom he has a long personal history. Herrera said Cartas was the cinematographer on the first movie he made, and that the two crossed paths again 26 years later on Facing El Chapo. The actor called the reunion especially meaningful, praising Cartas' command of the action-thriller genre.
The response has been immediate. The film reached No. 1 on Netflix in 71 countries shortly after its August 21 release, while the usually exacting Spanish novelist Arturo Pérez-Reverte publicly recommended it after watching it on the platform.
"Last night I watched La Captura, directed by Chava Cartas, and it seemed to me an extraordinary film," Pérez-Reverte wrote on X. "Great Mexican cinema is still very great."
Anoche vi "La captura", dirigida por @Chavacartas, y me pareció una película extraordinaria. El gran cine mexicano sigue siendo muy grande. pic.twitter.com/4jSSHJS57l
— Arturo Pérez-Reverte (@perezreverte) August 25, 2026
Herrera said the scale of the reception has surprised the entire team. So has the audience response to an unexpected scene in which Carmona sings from inside the patrol vehicle, a moment that has quickly circulated across social media.
"I had no idea," he said with a laugh. "I didn't see it coming at all."
But beyond the viral moment, Facing El Chapo has connected by shifting a familiar story away from the drug lord and toward the people who had to make an impossible decision when it mattered most.
