On the evening of January 9, 2012, the Mexican actress Kate del Castillo poured a glass of wine, sat down at her computer, and opened Twitter. She had just returned home, to Los Angeles, after a Caribbean cruise with her sister and her parents. The previous year had been difficult: in November, her marriage to the actor and model Aarón Díaz had ended. Del Castillo had spent much of the year starring as a drug trafficker in “La Reina del Sur” (“The Queen of the South”), a sixty-three-episode telenovela on Telemundo. Her character, Teresa Mendoza, a small-town Mexican woman whose love life enticed her into the narcotics trade, was given to ruthlessly practical observations. “Life’s a business,” Teresa once said. “The only thing that changes is the merchandise.” The series had dominated ratings in the Spanish-speaking world, and made her a household name, particularly in Mexico, but for del Castillo, who is forty-three, the experience had been overwhelming; at one point during filming, she had received medical treatment for exhaustion.

Now she thumbed through a few notebooks filled with song lyrics and observations, and then started typing in an app that allowed her to write longer tweets. “Today I want to express what I think, and if it suits anybody else, great,” she began, in Spanish. During the next half hour, she proceeded to free-associate on love and politics: “I don’t believe in marriage, I believe in love . . . I don’t believe in either punishment or sin . . . I don’t believe in the Pope and the Vatican and all their wealth . . . I am alive and for that I thank God every day, for who I am, for good or bad.”

Then she turned to Joaquín Guzmán Loera, known as El Chapo, or Shorty—the leader of the Sinaloa drug cartel. El Chapo had escaped from prison in 2001, and had been at large since then. He was widely understood to be the most powerful drug lord in Mexico, if not the world, and was considered responsible for the deaths of thousands of people. Yet many Mexicans saw him as a populist antihero rather than as a murderer, because of his humble origins, his defiance of a corrupt and ineffective federal government, and his reputation for benevolence to Sinaloa’s poor and downtrodden. Del Castillo wrote, “Today I believe more in El Chapo Guzmán than I do in the governments that hide truths from me, even if they are painful, who hide the cures for cancer, AIDS, etc., for their own benefit. MR. CHAPO, WOULDN’T IT BE COOL IF YOU STARTED TRAFFICKING WITH THE GOOD? . . . COME ON SEñOR, YOU WOULD BE THE HERO OF HEROES. LET’S TRAFFIC WITH LOVE, YOU KNOW HOW.” She signed off, “I love you all, Kate,” pressed Send, brushed her teeth, and went to bed.

Shortly afterward, Del Castillo went to Tijuana, where a friend was undergoing breast-implant surgery. In the hospital, the popular talk show “Tercer Grado” was playing on TV, and del Castillo and her friend watched as the guests took turns denouncing her tweet. Carlos Marín, the editorial director of the publishing company Grupo Milenio, was particularly savage. “This actress wrote a truly stupid thing on Twitter,” he said, “and she displays an abysmal ignorance about the problem of cancer, the problem of AIDS.” He added that this “beautiful, lovely, great actress” was “encouraging the commission of crime.”

For weeks, the Mexican public obsessed over del Castillo’s tweet, debating whether she was an apologist for the cruelty and bloodshed committed in El Chapo’s name. Her father, Eric del Castillo, who is also a well-known actor, defended her to the media but then e-mailed her a line-by-line critique of her manifesto. Her older sister, the journalist Verónica del Castillo, says that she angrily reminded Kate, “You are not Teresa Mendoza.”

Last month, I met del Castillo at her house in a gated community in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. She was sitting on a sunny terrace beside an infinity pool and an array of saguaro cacti. She poured two glasses of a reposado tequila called Honor, a brand she is a part owner of. She wore tight jeans, a blouse, and very high heels, and had a small gold earring in her right lobe that read “Fuck.” “I was so upset,” she said, of the reaction to her tweet. “You know, why are they crushing me? I’m not saying all of this is true. This is just what I believe!”

Four years after the fact, del Castillo still seemed bewildered. Her mother, who is also named Kate, told me, “Everything she does is that way—without thinking about the consequences.” The consequence that del Castillo had least anticipated was that the man she had addressed in her tweet might actually respond.

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As del Castillo tells the story, in the late summer of 2014 she received an e-mail from one of El Chapo’s associates. Through the Mexican actors’ guild, he had found her parents’ telephone number in Mexico City and told her mother that he was a movie producer who wished to speak to Kate about a project. The first messages he sent del Castillo were vague. Only when she replied that she was too busy for such inquiries did the man state his business: Soy licenciado de Señor Joaquín Guzmán Loera. (“I am Señor Joaquín Guzmán Loera’s lawyer.”) He told her that the drug lord, who had been re-arrested that February, was interested in making a movie about his life. He asked if she would come to Mexico City to discuss the prospect. (Del Castillo says that her computer has not saved these e-mails, and that she is relying on her memory of the exchange.) “I immediately said yes,” she told me.

The lawyer, Andrés Granados Flores, had approached del Castillo at a propitious moment. She was in Miami, filming another “narco-series” for Telemundo. Despite the success of “La Reina del Sur,” most people in the U.S. had never heard of her. She had moved to L.A. in 2001, to break into the American movie industry. Patricia Riggen, who cast del Castillo as an undocumented immigrant in her 2007 film, “Under the Same Moon,” told me, “She went from a place where everyone knew her to a place where no one did.” She added, “I think it took a lot of courage.”

For her first U.S. role, in the 2002 PBS series “American Family,” del Castillo says that she was made to dye her brunet hair black, so that she would appear more Latina. She was turned down for other roles, because her accent was too pronounced. In an effort to burnish her acting credentials, she sought out edgy roles, playing a transgender prison inmate in “K-11” and a Bolivian prostitute in “American Visa.” She also appeared in the Showtime series “Weeds,” playing a nefarious Mexican politician who is killed when she gets whacked with a croquet mallet. But such opportunities were rare. She said, “I’d go to auditions, and all the time it’s ‘You’re too Latina,’ or ‘You’re not Latina enough.’ ” Meanwhile, she continued to act in telenovelas like the one she was filming in Miami, in which she again played a wily and glamorous drug trafficker.