You know those days when you would kill for an empanada? Good.
It was a cool and sunny morning in Manhattan’s Washington Heights neighborhood last month, and the actress Justina Machado and the writer Aaron Mark had arranged to meet there to talk about their new Amazon series, “The Horror of Dolores Roach.” . An eight-part horror comedy, starting Friday on Prime Video, the show puts the neighborhood center stage, which is why I took the train north. It does the same for cannibalism, although nothing like that was planned as far as I knew.
But we had all day to talk about people’s food. First, empanadas. Mark and Machado grabbed a park bench and tucked into the hot, crunchy hand pastries—guava and cheese, carne de res—from Empanadas Monumental, near 157th Street and Broadway, around the corner from where Mark lived for ten years as what he called a playwright “broke, broke, broke”.
I drooled a little as I watched Machado and Mark chow down on the face-sized empanadas, which were perfectly golden brown, bubbly in all the right places, and dripping, not greasy. They were tasty, Machado said, but she loved the chicken and cheese pastelillos, fried balls similar to empanadas her Puerto Rican mother used to make.
“She would make them with a cafe con leche,” said Machado, best known for her roles in the reboot of “One Day at a Time” and “Jane the Virgin.” “I could kill four.”
Devouring empanadas, we moved to a nearby café – this time to chat about cinnamon rolls – and came straight to the macabre meat of “Dolores Roach”. Mark, who created the show, serves as showrunner with Dara Resnik. Based on his fictional Gimlet Media podcast of the same name (2018-19), the series itself is an adaptation of the one-woman play he wrote, ‘Empanada Loca’. A DailyExpertNews review of the 2015 Off Broadway production by the Labyrinth Theater Company called it an “exuberantly macabre” show.
Machado stars as Dolores, who returns to a spruced up Washington Heights after 16 years in prison for taking on the rap for her drug dealer boyfriend. Bewildered by her new surroundings, she tries to start life again as a masseuse in the basement of an empanada shop run by her old friend Luis (Alejandro Hernández). But after her first client jerk gropes her, and she snaps and kills him in a sudden rage, she can’t seem to stop killing.
Much to the delight of his unsuspecting customers, the deranged Luis decides to make empanadas filled with the crumbled dead body parts of her victims, leaving Dolores to wonder how her life has taken such a monstrous path.
Mark, a self-proclaimed “Jew from Texas” and longtime horror fan, said the idea for a “contemporary gender-flipped ‘Sweeney Todd'” began to seep in 2013, when he and actress Daphne Rubin-Vega developed the idea in New York City. York. (She played Dolores in the play and podcast and is an executive producer on the series.) Mark moved to Los Angeles four years ago, where he had no luck pitching it as a TV series.
But the theater world is small: Mimi O’Donnell, a former artistic director of Labyrinth, was asked to lead scripted podcasts at Gimlet, and she brought the project over as her first fiction podcast. (She’s now the head of script fiction at Spotify Studios.) In 2019, horror producer Blumhouse Television came on board to help develop it for TV.
The show features a number of high-profile names in supporting roles, including Cyndi Lauper as a Broadway usher who moonlights as a private investigator and Marc Maron as the empanada store’s landlord.
But the series also has two uncredited stars: empanadas and Washington Heights. Mark said the show’s food stylist Rossy Earle tapped into her Panamanian roots to choreograph how Hernández rolled, filled and baked the empanadas. She made several recipes for Dolores’ victims, so that each filling of corpse flesh had its own flavor.
For Dolores’ first victim, Earle stewed pork shoulder and butt in Achiote oil to give the stuffing a gooey mouthfeel — “Greasy and unpleasant,” like the character, Earle wrote in an email.
Much of the series was shot in Ontario, but parts were filmed in Washington Heights, including on Mark’s old sidewalk on West 156th Street, where he recalled spending days “listening to what gentrification did to the people who been here for decades.”
“That’s really what brought me to ‘Sweeney Todd,'” he said. “I thought, this neighborhood is cannibalizing itself.”
(Mark acknowledged in an email that he himself had been “very much an uptown intruder”; that realization and a growing “sense of guilt,” he said, had fueled his urge to write about what he’d seen and which he was a part of.)
Growing up in Chicago, Machado also had a personal connection to Washington Heights. In 2009, she made her Broadway debut in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s breakthrough musical ‘In the Heights’, set there.
“I think there’s something about the Heights calling to me,” she said.
As our conversation drew to a close and Machado and Mark looked at their doggy bag empanadas, they wondered if a second season was in the works. But Roach is Dolores’ last name for a reason. “She’s unkillable,” Mark said.
Is she a cold-blooded monster? Or victim of circumstances? Machado and Mark disagreed completely.
“She’s not a maniac,” Mark said. “She wants to be a good person.”
“She’s a survivor,” Machado said. “But she’s a sociopath.”
Regardless, Machado called it “liberating” to be on a show about Latinos that wasn’t afraid to be comically sinister and dazzlingly gory.
“When we try to tell our stories, we feel a responsibility to make it a happy ending because we want to change the story, we want people to know that we have human experiences, that we are human beings,” she said. “But we also like horror.”
Playing Dolores, she added with a laugh, “I’m a Latina serial killer and I’m proud of it.” I’m real.”
