While filming “Nightmare Road” one evening in Toronto, del Toro encouraged Collins to write a screenplay about Gonzalez-Gonzalez. Collins began writing that night.
Gonzalez-Gonzalez received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 2011, five years after her death and decades after her first search. Collins recalled that she instinctively switched to Spanish when she quoted her grandfather: “When she got cancer, she said to me, ‘Mijo, I’ve had a bigger life than I could have imagined, the only thing I never had was that pinch star,’ and I said, ‘Grandpa, I promise you it’s him. I said, ‘I will bring you the star.
The promise was kept in part thanks to the advocacy of Samuel L. Jackson, whom Collins sees as a father figure. The two starred together in the 1997 crime drama.one eight sevenCollins played a young gang member opposite Jackson’s high school teacher and they’ve been close friends ever since.
Referring to “preparation, attention to detail, love of craft,” Jackson said Collins embodied the fact that “there are no small parts, only small actors.” Collins is “the kind of actor who demands your best and gives you credit”.
Onscreen, Collins has appeared on both sides of the law several times as a border agent, and others as men behind bars, like Cesar in the movie “One Eight Seven.” But while it’s psychologically three-dimensional and rich, there’s a double standard for Latinos when it comes to roles, he said, not positive portrayals or seeming to perpetuate stereotypes. The actor said that with “One Eight Seven,” mainstream critics discredited him, that the production found a real culprit for the role, as if he couldn’t be an actor working on the role. Meanwhile, he said the ALMA Awards, which honor Latino Americans in entertainment, would not consider his performance because they only emphasized that they thought of representation as curative.
“How can Robert De Niro and Al Pacino get awards for playing their community’s gangsters? But when we play the gangsters of our communities, they say, ‘Don’t do that. We must be good immigrants.”