Let CODA's Eugenio Derbez park your heart in The Valet first look

Though Eugenio Derbez is no stranger to the big screen, American audiences are still getting to know the Mexican star who has been making Mexico and Latin America laugh for nearly 40 years. Now, fresh off an awards run after starring in Best Picture winner CODA, his next project, The Valet, is ready to rev its way into hearts.

In the upcoming comedy, world-famous movie star Olivia (Samara Weaving) faces a publicity crisis when a paparazzi snaps a photo of her with her married lover, politician Vincent Royce (Max Greenfield). Hard-working valet Antonio (Derbez) accidentally appears in the same disastrous photo and is enlisted to pose as Olivia's new boyfriend as a cover-up to prevent Vincent's wife, Kathryn (Betsy Brandt) from finding out and a creating a scandal that would wreck both Olivia and Vincent's careers. Of course, hijinks ensue.

The Valet is an adaptation of the 2006 French film La doublure, and while the plot sounds like a classic rom-com, Derbez tells EW that, in addition to being a "funny, heartwarming, and unexpected story of friendship and family," it's also "a love letter for immigrants."

"I feel that there are a lot of immigrants that are not seen in America. Every morning, the whole country wakes up and goes to get coffee or breakfast," he continues. "And all these people that arrive at 4:00 AM, 3:00 AM, to start making the food and cooking, as well as others, like the janitors, the valet parking, they are basically invisible. They're part of this system, but they're not seen. This movie talks about that, about the human desire to feel seen. And this film is a celebration of the everyman."

The film's backbone is "a celebration of a lot of things: family values, how to treat people. It's just about being a good human being," says Weaving. She notes that she had been looking for a comedy, a "sort of rom-com" to be more precise, when she initially read the script. "The script just... I hadn't really seen anything like it in a long time. I haven't seen any that really tickled me in a long time until I read this one. It had all the ingredients that I was looking for."

When we first meet Weaving's character Olivia, she's every bit of the aloof movie star you would expect. "​​I really do enjoy playing, well, a lovable kind of [person] with questionable morals... who might not be the nicest human being," she notes. "I love playing bitches."

Those questionable morals are on full display in Olivia's affair with a married man, but one rom-com trope you won't see in the film is women pitted against other women. "Neither of them looks at the other woman as the enemy," Brandt says of her character and Olivia. "And I don't even like the word, enemy. They do it in a different way, but they kind of fall on the same side that they're fighting against… and it's just really funny."

With Weaving and Brandt playing the women in his life, Greenfield says he pitched director Richard Wong on a different approach to his character. "Well, I think my pitch to Richard at the time was there's so much love in this movie and Eugenio is such an open, vulnerable actor, that I said, 'I think the only way to get away with it with this guy is that he's genuinely in love with both of these women, and doesn't know what to do.' And he's the white guy in the movie. He is used to getting everything that he wants in this world. And he doesn't understand why these two women that he loves so much, why he can't have both."

Wanting the remake to feel authentic to Los Angeles, Derbez and his production company 3Pas had to fight for the film to be multilingual, encompassing not just English, but Spanish and Korean as well. "We had a lot of people telling us it should be more English, that it should be almost 90 percent English. And we were like, 'No, we want to be real.'"

"If I'm a Mexican valet parking attendant, when I go home, I'm probably not going to speak in English with my kid. I might do that when I pick him up at school, but when I'm home with my mom… A lot of Latin immigrant parents don't speak English, they just speak Spanish. So we wanted to reflect that reality. And you can feel, and you can see, and you can hear how L.A. is multicultural and we wanted to reflect that. There's this romance in the film where they don't speak the same language but they can get along. That's part of real-life and we wanted to reflect that and be truthful. So we didn't want to just speak in English all the time, because that's real."

Brandt agrees, adding, "So much the scenes in Spanish or Korean are about family and being around the table together and sharing food, and that kind of transcended and spoke through whether someone spoke the same language or not. There are multiple really lovely things between characters that don't speak the same language. And those are the moments where the real beauty comes in and you get to see. That's part of the charm of this film."

And while it's clear the charm of the film was its biggest draw, Greenfield, Brandt, and Weaving all were eager to work with Derbez.

"He's just incredible. He really takes his time, and he works so hard. He is a fantastic leader as well," says Weaving of the Mexican star. "He really makes sure everyone's okay and he's incredibly kind and looks out for everyone. Whenever I work with comedians like him, I'm just blown away with how their brains work. I can sort of deliver a line in a funny way, but that next level of being able to come out with alternate jokes, and if a scene isn't working, just making everyone laugh so much."

Greenfield adds, "I thought Richard [Wong] did such a great job and what he did, which I loved so much, and kind of what I love about Eugenio as well, is they're able to just maintain a level of heart and vulnerability and ground a story and still manage to keep it really funny. And when you can do that, I think you really end up with a winning movie and telling a winning story. I'm just happy to be a part of it."

For Derbez, just being on set with actors he had long admired left him in awe. "I always feel weird because I did my entire career in Mexico and Latin America," he states. "But here in the U.S., I'm a new face for a lot of people. So when I was working with them, I felt like the new guy, like I'm starting all over again. So I'm really, really happy that finally, they know my work and they know me as an actor."

The Valet premieres May 20 on Hulu.

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