For ‘The Lincoln Lawyer,’ Manuel Garcia-Rulfo Climbs in the Front Seat

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/17/arts/television/lincoln-lawyer-manuel-garcia-rulfo.html

Version 0 of 1.

LOS ANGELES — Manuel Garcia-Rulfo had just landed his first lead on a big American series, and then it hit him: Mickey Haller, the title character of “The Lincoln Lawyer,” is a defense attorney. That meant he would have courtroom speeches.

“I have an accent; English is not my first language,” Garcia-Rulfo, who was born and raised in Mexico, said while sipping tea during a recent chat. “The first days I was having panic attacks and all that. I have no idea how I pulled it off, in English, with the amount of dialogue I had to learn. We were shooting and I was like, ‘I can’t do this.’ I was going to quit.”

Spoiler alert: He did not quit.

“The Lincoln Lawyer,” which premiered last week on Netflix, is based on a character created by the writer Michael Connelly, who is also behind the best-selling Harry Bosch franchise. A wily Los Angeles attorney, Mickey works out of various Lincolns — in the show he alternates between a vintage convertible and a new S.U.V. — as he travels from one courthouse to another. The season is largely based on the second Mickey Haller novel, “The Brass Verdict.” (Bosch, who has a supporting role in that book, does not appear in the Netflix show because the character is tied to a long-running Amazon series.)

For viewers who remember that Matthew McConaughey played Mickey in a 2011 movie, seeing Garcia-Rulfo in the role might, at first glance, feel like a departure.

In reality, it’s a return: The protagonist of the novels has an American father and a Mexican mother, and the “Lincoln Lawyer” creative team — including the show’s creator, the prolific writer-producer David E. Kelley (“Big Little Lies,” “Anatomy of a Scandal”) — decided to lean on his maternal heritage when casting the part.

“We wanted to have our own Mickey Haller, to really give the viewer a new angle on this character,” Connelly, who is an executive producer and was in the series’ writing room, said in a video chat. “You’d think it’s not that genius to say, ‘Let’s go with what’s in the book,’ but it’s rare that Hollywood does that.”

This felt like a fresh start for Garcia-Rulfo, too. The day after he finished dubbing the voice of his character for the show’s Spanish version — a valuable skill considering Netflix’s global ambitions — the tall, lanky actor turned up at a coffee shop in his Studio City neighborhood in Los Angeles. His dimples barely visible under a light stubble, a newsboy cap perched on his head, Garcia-Rulfo, 41, sounded simultaneously startled and excited, perhaps even a little disbelieving, by the turn his career had just taken.

Not that he had been twirling his thumbs before the pandemic, with roles in such big English-language films as “The Magnificent Seven,” “Murder on the Orient Express,” “Widows” and “6 Underground.” But when Covid struck, he decided to leave his Los Angeles home and shelter back in Mexico, where he grew up on a Guadalajara ranch with a film-loving grandfather who was into Charlie Chaplin and the Mexican comedian Cantinflas.

“We would have popcorn, and he would project the films that he did when my father and my aunts were kids,” Garcia-Rulfo said of his grandfather’s home movies. “My aunts started making their own movies — I was the main character most of the times — and I think I grew an obsession with cinema from that.”

When he was 13, his parents sent young Manuel to Vermont for a year so he could improve his English (learning to ski was a perk). Because the Stella Adler Studio of Acting, in New York, and a clown school in France — “Even actors in Mexico that are not clowns have done it,” he said — were too expensive, he studied acting in Los Angeles and Mexico. His career took off fairly quickly afterward, even if his American parts could be somewhat repetitive: a hit man here, an outlaw there, a smuggler for a change of pace.

So when he was asked to read for “The Lincoln Lawyer,” while still in Mexico, Garcia-Rulfo jumped on the opportunity and sent in a tape.

“I was very pleased and very thankful with the showrunners and producers, with Netflix to bet on that,” he said, adding that he was grateful to play a lead who wasn’t a drug dealer. (The tide may have turned: A few days before our chat, he had wrapped the Tom Hanks drama “A Man Called Otto,” in which he plays an I.T. guy he described as “a nice man, funny and dorky.”)

Garcia-Rulfo got the part of Mickey, his first lead in a TV series, after a casting process that took place entirely online — something that gave him another excuse to fret. “You have pressure when you’re thinking, ‘Maybe when they see me in person, they’re going to be like, ‘No, this is not it,’” he said.

Neve Campbell, who plays Mickey’s first wife, Maggie, said that she had reached out to her new co-star and that they went on a hike to get to know each other before work started last year.

“He was understandably nervous considering taking on the role of the Lincoln Lawyer when you’re not using your first language,” she said.

“I said, ‘Listen, television is one day at a time,’” she added. “‘And there will be people helping you.’”

Still, there were some early jitters. “The very first scene we shot together was in the first episode,” Campbell said, laughing. “He pulled the car up, and he jumped out, but he forgot to put the car in park and it kept rolling down.” (Mickey is chauffeured around by one of his former clients, played by Jazz Raycole, so Garcia-Rulfo, who in real life prefers walking or bicycling, does not have to do much driving for the show.)

Garcia-Rulfo’s dyslexia added to his jitters. To learn his lines, he went back to a method his grandmother, who was an artist, had taught him.

“I bought this board and I put it in my apartment and — it was insane — I did brain mapping with pictures, drawings,” he said. “I did that in every scene. If there was a gun, I would draw a gun. It’s easier for me to learn that way.”

Learning lines was only part of the job, though. The executive producer and showrunner Ted Humphrey (“The Good Wife”) recalled that Garcia-Rulfo had many queries on set.

“Sometimes they were questions about specific phrases or lines, but more often they were the deeper kinds of character questions: How would a real criminal defense lawyer think about this or that, or approach this or that?” Humphrey said in an email.

“He can be very instinctual, which I think is a great and necessary trait for an actor, but there’s also often a great deal of thought behind how he approaches things.”

The actor also helped ground his version of Mickey. “In the script, he would be eating a burger, and I would be like, ‘Let’s explore his Mexican side and get burritos or tacos,’” Garcia-Rulfo said. “At some point he orders a bourbon or something, and I’m like, ‘Let’s move to tequila.’ Why not? It’s his heritage.”

And once he got in the groove, he even found himself relaxing at last.

“I really enjoyed it,” he said, laughing. “He’s kicking ass in the courtroom. It feels good.”