To get an idea of what The Horror of Dolores Roach is all about, picture Sweeney Todd. Only this time, instead of being a demon barber carving up people around Fleet Street while a friend grinds the victims into meat pies, he's a female masseuse who murders people around Washington Heights while a friend grinds the victims into empanadas.
The project began as a one-woman play, Empanada Loca, by Aaron Mark, who first adapted it as a podcast — which he also directed — before penning the pilot script. The eight-episode limited series, premiering July 8 on Prime Video, stars Justina Machado as Dolores, an ex-con who returns home post-parole to find the drug-dealing boyfriend she went to prison to protect has vanished. Meanwhile, she reunites with an old friend, Luis (Alejandro Hernandez), who lets her set up a massage studio in the basement of his empanada shop. It doesn't take long for Dolores to become an accidental murderess and Luis's pastries to be filled with a mysterious new ingredient that makes them the most sought-after delicacy in New York.
Even though the series has "horror" in the title and cannibalism in its plot, Machado says she took the part because the show "is so much more than a horror comedy." While she admits Dolores Roach bears some similarities to Sweeney Todd, "the original version of that was about greed. The musical version was about revenge. This show is about survival. It's about the gentrification of places like Washington Heights, and all the confusion that causes for Dolores when she gets out of prison after sixteen years and finds a world very different from what it was when she went away."
Playing Dolores also gave Machado a new challenge. After all, Dolores does kill several characters in rather nasty fashion, but she is still the central protagonist.
"It was exciting for me because Dolores isn't a victim or a hero," Machado explains. "There are circumstances that make her what she becomes. There are times when she's victimized, and there are times when she's a monster. That's a tough line to walk, making a person who kills people someone you root for."
As the chef behind the gruesome goodies, Hernandez also had a difficult time preparing to play a decent dude who ends up going very dark.
"We're never the bad guy in our own stories, so Luis doesn't see himself that way at all," Hernandez says. "He's got valid wants and concerns about his own livelihood. He's never had a win in his life and suddenly, he has one thanks to these new empanadas. The cannibalism aspect is really just an afterthought for him. He doesn't get hung up on that, so I tried to not do that, too. He's just a very charismatic, giving individual who also happens to serve people to people."
What wasn't an afterthought is the show's cast and crew, most of whom are Latino.
"It's great to see people of color in a space like this," Hernandez says. "These aren't the type of stories we're always allowed to be in. We were able to do things that were quirky and off the wall, so an experience like this was amazing. This job instilled in me how fun acting is."
Still, there's no getting around the fact that, at its core, The Horror of Dolores Roach is a human food fest. In order to, yes, flesh out the story, production crafted a collection of mutilated corpses that Hernandez describes as creepy, due to their hyperrealism. The partially dismembered bodies were hung in one particular room, making filming in that location the longest day of production, according to Machado. A line was drawn with one scene, however, where Dolores picks up a victim's face and looks through the now-vacant eye sockets. The moment "was so terrifying," according to Machado, the producers decided to nix it.
Even without the chilling scene, spending a day shooting inside a room filled with bodies left quite an impression on her.
"This was my first job in a very long time, and it took me a while to come back to Earth to settle into Dolores," she says. "For about a month afterward, I needed to decompress and didn't want to do anything because playing Dolores left me really tired. She's always in a heightened state. At the same time, though, multiple murders aside, she is probably the most grounded person in this story, and I wanted people to think that she's them, if everything went wrong in their lives."
The Horror of Dolores Roach comes from Aaron Mark, who also serves as coshowrunner and executive producer with Dara Resnik, alongside executive producers Daphne Rubin-Vega, Jason Blum, Chris McCumber, Jeremy Gold and Chris Dickie for Blumhouse Television; Dawn Ostroff, Mimi O'Donnell and Justin McGoldrick for Spotify; Gloria Calderón Kellett for GloNation Studios; and Roxann Dawson, who directed the pilot.
