A chance interaction with a casting director at his middle school in Mexico City led junior transfer student Alberto Perez-Jacome to his first professional role as Wagner in Netflix’s 2023 magical-realism show The Chosen One.
“It was a super rare chance,” Perez-Jacome said. “This woman comes up to me at school, points to me and asks if I would like to audition for the show.”
Perez-Jacome had always wanted to audition for a movie, but as he explained, “[My mom] usually responded that it’s a hard life for a child actor.” He didn’t take the typical route of signing with a manager to find roles. Getting randomly selected by a casting director while living in Mexico was unorthodox in every sense of the industry.
The next steps happened quickly and somewhat chaotically. Because he had to run to class, Perez-Jacome couldn’t wait for the crew to set up equipment for an official audition. “We went to the school theater, and she just filmed on her phone, asked me some questions and had me do some improv,” he said. The brief 15 minutes he spent with the director led to a callback within weeks.
After four rounds of callbacks, Perez-Jacome was invited to a month-long Netflix acting workshop with two Brazilian professionals and actors from across Mexico. One of the coaches, Fatima Toledo, has 30 years of industry experience; her casts have earned 511 awards and 348 nominations from film critics worldwide, including two Golden Globe nominations and six Oscar nominations.
During the month, production steadily narrowed the field of actors through constant auditions. “It was super intense exercises for about 10 hours a day,” Perez-Jacome said. “It felt surreal.”
He was still in the workshop when he learned he’d been cast as one of the main roles. “We were being filmed constantly, all day, even while eating lunch and playing soccer on breaks. The director came in and was watching us the whole day. It was nerve-racking,” he said.
After the roles were announced, Perez-Jacome met the senior actors on the project, including Carlos Bardem, a 2024 nominee for Best Actor in an International Production from the Spanish Actors Union. One week later, Perez-Jacome was on a plane to the desert to begin filming — without ever having been given a script.
His filming schedule varied depending on the shoot: some days ran eight hours, while others stretched through the night from 8 p.m. to 8 a.m. A few routines remained consistent. “I would wake up, always at different crazy early hours, [and] walk over to the main studio, the green room, where I prepared my lines, hair and costumes,” he said. He quickly learned the importance of punctuality: “Even just one minute late and they wouldn’t pay you.”
Days on set typically began with an hour of makeup, then rehearsing lines before the actual shoot.
For Perez-Jacome, seeing the inner workings of a major production was eye-opening. “It’s hard to understand how much people are [working] behind the scenes. There is a person for everything, so it’s always an insanely big production,” he said.
Perez-Jacome plans to stay in the filmmaking industry, whether through directing or acting. He has taken three moviemaking classes in high school and is expanding his understanding of production’s intricacies. “The storytelling of how to make a good narrative while shooting [a scene] isn’t something you entirely see [while acting]. When an actor shows up on set, all of that work is already done,” he said.
Still, he has no plans to pause his academics for acting. “It’s a hard schedule, and […] I guess I just wanted to enjoy being a kid for right now,” Perez-Jacome said.
