Inside ‘Ozark’ Actor Felix Solis’ Special Method To Enjoying Villain Omar Navarro

Ozark’s closing episodes are now streaming on Netflix

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and actor Felix Solis is pulling back the curtain for us, revealing his approach of portraying drug lord and the key antagonist for the collection, Omar Navarro.

To play the cartel leader Ozark fans were being very long conscious of but didn’t satisfy till time 3, Solis stayed absent from standard research like cartel documentaries or news posts but determined in which he could relate to the character in his personal daily life.

“I required to shy absent from [research] for 3 good reasons,” Solis instructed me. “One is I had resisted auditioning for roles like this for pretty some time just before I auditioned for this part. I was striving incredibly challenging not to contribute to some thing I failed to want to contribute to, and so I was not. But the irony is that I also was not obtaining the roles that I preferred to play.

“At the time I was auditioning, I just wasn’t getting them. And I remember a single time just likely following about six or 7 rejections, I considered to myself, sitting down in my vehicle, ‘All ideal, universe, clearly I am not finding what I am asking you for so you have a thing else in mind for me. I will humbly accept and take on whatsoever it is that you assume it is that I am supposed to be carrying out next with my vocation as an actor.’

“And then this audition arrived along and I believed, ‘Ooh, there it is. Ironically more than enough, the incredibly factor I have been shying absent from for the final 5 to 10 yrs.’ I reported, ‘Okay, very well, if this is what I am supposed to do, then I am heading to check out to do it to the very best of my talents to a level where I can slumber nicely at night wherever I can sense like I’m not betraying what I have been attempting to combat for for the final few of decades.’

“And I thought, ‘How do I do this?’ and that is when I arrived up with this notion that he just has to be a typical dude. He has to be a normal, regular dude. So I shied absent from [research] a little little bit.

“And also, far too, in some cases, I am a reference kind actor, the place I think that you actually do not have a true possibility to do a scene or a minute to the greatest of its capacity if you really don’t have some sort of a reference. Which is not to say that I went out and I started off dealing medication, but I do know what it’s like to operate a business enterprise.

“I have my individual creation enterprise. I do know what it is like to have individuals look up to you and seem for responses when you can find a trouble likely on. I have experienced to control persons. I’ve had to take care of relationships. I’ve experienced to be close to men and women who’re insisting and frightening and unsafe. I have had to just simply because of my lifetime and who I am. I have people references. So I never automatically need to seem for all those.

“I knew that I could connect with upon my own lifetime experience for specified times in the script. And using the phrase script … which is if on the web site, anyone gets shot in the head, I are not able to do nearly anything about that. Which is on the web page. That is the composing. It’s going to happen no issue what. So I can tackle it. It truly is going to take place. It truly is by now on the web site.

“So to add to it or sense like you have to contribute a thing to it is, for me, needless due to the fact it can be currently there. It can be likely to come about. No subject how you perform the scene, the scene nonetheless ends with somebody receiving shot. So how do we then play it to the most attention-grabbing amount, how do we engage in it to the most unpredicted amount?”

Once Felix had his reference position for Omar, it was straightforward for him to jump into the character without having analyzing his unfathomable crimes and both equally the looming hazard he offered to people today like the Byrdes and faced himself, from his enemies.

“Well, the initially, speedy bullet to the head of an actor is to make a judgement on the character they’re playing,” Solis said. “So I instantly failed to. I fully removed any judgement of who I considered this man or woman could be and in its place mentioned to myself, ‘Who is this human being to other individuals?’

“Meaning, I was hoping — as the character ongoing to establish and as I was questioned to come back and do far more episodes and proceed and so on and so forth — I was hoping to test and acquire a particular person that would have this variety of circumstance.

“You’re at Penn Station waiting around for the practice to go property. You might be at the neighborhood bar getting a beer just before the teach will come. And when you happen to be sitting, you have a dialogue with a guy, and he tells you what he does, and he states, ‘Oh, I have my own business enterprise. I operate it. It is really kind of an global small business, and I get the job done with folks, and my family’s essential to me. And how about you?’ ‘Well, your family— oh, that is a beautiful— oh, you happen to be married with youngsters…’

“You have just a regular dialogue with the person at a bar. Then you get on the coach, and you go house. And a pair of weeks afterwards, you’re observing the information, and you go, ‘That’s the man who I was just acquiring the… appropriate?’

“So then you do not ever get an option, which we never ever should really, to go, ‘I know particularly who that dude is as shortly as I look.’ So opposite to that, I required to make guaranteed that I was an everyday-er. I was an everyman and I was the particular person who could have been managing a food items stand or a bodega or an automobile mechanic shop or any business.

“So I approached him from the male who’s jogging a small business, and regrettably, or thankfully, based on how you pick out to check out it, the business he operates has to have a specific kind of protocol. There is certainly a certain established of rules that have to be adhered by in this distinct small business that I am in. …

“I suggest it can be just exciting due to the fact they are — drug lords are people too, just like a law enforcement officer is, just like a health practitioner is, just like a lawyer is, like a mechanic, like a superintendent, like a plumber. They’re all human. So what’s most attention-grabbing to me is to try and obtain the dude, the character, the temperament of the dude, somewhat than what he does.”