Los Espookys Breakout Ana Fabrega Isn’t Afraid to Let Things Get Weird (2024)

Ana Fabrega will go to great lengths to land a joke. In the new absurdist comedy Los Espookys, which she created and stars in with Fred Armisen (Portlandia), and Saturday Night Live writer and comedian Julio Torres, the comedian plays ditzy Tati, a naïf known for working the oddest of odd jobs (spinning a busted fan to cool a priest, breaking in women’s shoes, counting other people’s steps). When her fright-fanatic friends—Renaldo (Bernardo Velasco), a good-natured goth whose passion for gore is only hampered by his continuous lack of cell phone minutes; and Andrés (Torres), the contemplative blue-haired adopted heir to a chocolate fortune—and her no-nonsense dental-assistant sister, Úrsula (Cassandra Ciangherotti), turn their love of horror into a business that revolves around scaring people, Tati is more than happy to become their guinea pig and stunt performer.

Fabrega was so committed that she didn’t tell anyone she gets seasick while shooting a scene in which Tati is tasked with becoming a tentacled sea monster (to help boost a seaside town’s tourist trade). “I thought, No I can handle it. It will be fine, it won’t take too long,” the actress said, laughing. “So we get on this little boat and we are out in the ocean, and I’m in this wetsuit that has tentacles, and my head is pounding, and I think, I’m gonna die. I have to get off the boat.” When she finally explained her situation to director Fernando Frias, he quickly called in her stunt double.

Though Los Espookys is surely the high-water mark of Fabrega’s burgeoning career, the stand-up comic has already developed quite a following with her singular brand of humor. Known on Twitter for her seconds-long videos featuring impressions, strange bits, and silly voices—all done in close-up—she came to Armisen’s attention in 2016, when Portlandia was hiring writers. Though she didn’t get that gig, the two ended up collaborating on several videos, and a Comedy Central web series that wasn’t picked up.

Not that the 27-year-old wasn’t cautious as she began her comedy career. Initially interested in finance, the Arizona native actually moved to New York City to study economics. After graduating from Fordham University, she went to work at the credit-risk-management company for which she had interned during college. A year into the job, she began going to open-mic nights. When her stand-up aspirations began interfering with her day job, the firm let her work from home for about two more years until she was able to support herself doing comedy full-time. She eventually landed gigs on TV series including At Home With Amy Sedaris, and The Chris Gethard Show.

When Armisen got the go-ahead for Los Espookys after pitching the idea to HBO, he enlisted Fabrega and Torres—with whom he’d also worked, and with whom Fabrega has been friends since 2012—to write the scripts. After the three knocked out a pilot, the two younger comedians took over, also serving as co-showrunners. Armisen, whose mother is Venezuelan, appears on the series as well; he plays Renaldo’s sweet Uncle Tico, a prodigious parking valet living his dream in Los Angeles, away from the unnamed Latin American country where the foursome reside.

Fabrega’s stamp can be found throughout the show, as the horror troupe stages an exorcism (guess who’s possessed?), creates a haunted house, and fakes the abduction of a U.S. ambassador. But it’s felt most strongly, of course, in her goofy alter ego, who does eccentric things like rejecting a handsome online suitor because he doesn’t look like his cartoon-prince avatar. “I really like characters who feel kind of lost and sort of slapstick-y in a Buster Keaton way,” the comedian said. One example: moments after Tati declares that nothing can stop her, she walks into a wall.

Fabrega also couldn’t resist poking fun at her American-accented Spanish. (The cast’s disparate accents—Velasco and Ciangherotti are Mexican, Torres is from El Salvador, and the series was shot in Chile—are why HBO’s Spanish-language, subtitled series takes place in an unnamed, fictionalized Latin American nation.) Though Spanish is the Scottsdale native’s first language—her parents are from Panama, and she visited family there every summer—she spoke English in school. So Tati’s manner of speaking is blamed on two weeks she spent in Minnesota. “As the series shot, my Spanish got stronger, and I wonder if people will pick up on the different hints of my accent—or lack of accent—throughout the show,” she said.

When it came to the other main characters’ development, Fabrega and Torres—whose moody but well-dressed Andrés is under pressure to marry his narcissistic boyfriend, Juan Carlos, and is also possessed by a spirit who insists he screen The King’s Speech—found Velasco and Ciangherotti’s input invaluable. Fabrega said that early on, levelheaded Renaldo—who dresses in black and lives with his mother, and is constantly explaining why his name isn’t spelled with a y—and pragmatic Úrsula, Tati’s protector and manager of the troupe’s increasingly outlandish stunts, “were still a little bit of a mystery to us. But once we saw how they interpreted these characters…it helped us write the rest of the series.” Still, the two comics also found their scene partners’ “actorly” ways funny. When Velasco and Ciangherotti would ask the showrunners about their characters’ intentions, “we were like, it’s just a joke. But of course, they are actors who wanted guidance, [to know about] their emotional life.”

Fittingly, the six-part series ends with Tati getting another unexpected job opportunity. As for Fabrega’s future? While she hopes Los Espookys gets picked up for another season—she wants to film some of it in Chile’s Atacama Desert—she has no precise employment plans beyond that. Tati would certainly be able to relate.