- A writer for "The Cleaning Lady" told Insider that he felt "immense pressure" to make the story accurate.
- Eddie Serrano told Insider that he used tales from his family and friends to write episode five.
Warning: Spoilers ahead for "The Cleaning Lady."
A writer for the
The new Fox drama, which is the network's first to be produced by and star Southeast Asian lead actors, follows a cleaner, Thony De La Rosa (Elodie Yung), who gets roped into working for the mob.
In episode five, Thony, her sister-in-law Fiona (Martha Millan), and their friend Gabby (Cosima Cabrera) are arrested as part of a ploy to force Thony to spy on her criminal employers.
Eddie Serrano, the writer of the fifth episode "Icebox," told Insider elements of the script came from his own personal experience and real-life stories told to him by his friends.
Serrano said that his partner's sister, who volunteers in a holding facility in Texas, once saw migrant young girls from the facility make bracelets out of string to give to social workers, guards, and other people in the facility as a "form of solidarity." This ended up being used in the fifth episode, where Thony is given a red bracelet before the other people in the facility interact with her.
A nail-biting scene towards the end of the episode, where an FBI agent chases after a bus full of frightened migrants heading for deportation was also based on a real event, according to Serrano.
"This is a heightened version of an FBI agent pulling the bus over but there's a story out of Phoenix, Arizona, where these dreamers [young migrants in the process of becoming US citizens] got in front of a deportation bus and wouldn't move until it backed into the facility," the writer said. "And then the lawyers were able to kind of come in and try to do what they need to do to help some of these people."
Serrano added: "Growing up along the US-Mexican border, I grew up with family and friends that have been detained or that became our guards and work in that world as border patrol agents. So I've seen [both] sides of it and I saw the humanity behind it, no matter where you stand or who you are in this sort of apparatus."
Serrano also told Insider that he was "knee-deep" in research before writing the episode.
"To be perfectly honest, I was terrified when I got assigned this episode. I felt this immense pressure to tell it right," Serrano said. "The more I got into it, the more it pulled me into this world, which could be really dark and depressing. And I had to kind of pull myself out of that and be like 'okay, how do I tell this story and find the levity in it?'"
The
—Miranda Kwok (@MirandaKwok88) January 23, 2022
"[Yung] brought in the Buddha that she has beside her bed," Kwok told Insider. "Everyone brings in their own cultural perspective, their own cultural touch. Aiden Canta [who plays a mobster in the series], he's from Northern Mexico and actually lived on the border as a child. He actually brings a lot of that to his character as well."
Kwok added: "We're so proud of having such a diverse cast, not only having a Filipino-Cambodian family at the core but a very multicultural cast all around."
"The Cleaning Lady" is available on Fox and Hulu.