New Netflix show Narcos a Shakespearean drug drama

Pedro Pascal plays DEA agent Javier Pena in Narcos.

The story of Colombian drugs kingpin Pablo Escobar has been adapted for the screen many times. The makers of the new 10-part Netflix series say the production isn't out to celebrate the man.

"I really love movies like Scarface, but that sort of slightly heroic drug dealer thing doesn't work any more," says Eric Newman, who co-reacted the show with Jose Padilha, the Brazilian film director of Elite Squad and the remake of Robocop.

"I think that's why a lot of Pablo Escobar stories they've tried to make in the past haven't really worked."

While Narcos does have a certain Goodfellas-style glamour to its depiction of Escobar's world, it is careful to present a fully rounded portrayal of the drugs trade.

Watch the trailer for Narcos:

Newman and Padilha worked closely with former DEA agents to ensure authenticity, the cast is largely Latin American — Escobar is played by rising Brazilian star Wagner Moura — and the dialogue is 60 per cent English and 40 per cent Spanish with subtitles.

"There's a completely Shakespearean sort of design to the whole thing," says Chilean-American actor Pedro Pascal (Oberyn Martell in Game of Thrones), who plays DEA agent Javier Pena.

"The guy's a king in so many different ways — a saint to some, a villain to others. I had my naive impressions of it all growing up in the 80s and the way it's been fed to us through entertainment and movies and stuff, but then you really see the details of how he rose and ran things. "

For Newman, his main concern was to ensure his wasn't a simple tale of Americans good, Colombians bad. Thus the DEA agents are shown making compromised choices to achieve their aims. Meanwhile Escobar's cartel use their blood money to initiate housing projects in the barrios of Medellin and still, relentlessly, innocent people die.

"It's a very complicated story," Newman says. "America is the largest market for cocaine in the world by far and I don't think we, even today, look at the violence in Mexico and think, as a people, 'wow, we are actually causing that'.

"Hopefully people are going to say, 'Wow. This is more complicated than I had previously thought'."

Observer

When: From today
Where: Netflix
What: The Pablo Escobar story