USA’s new narco-drama Queen of the South, which premieres this Thursday, has perhaps one of the most bonkers backstories in TV history. The series itself is based on a novel, La Reina del Sur, which takes its inspiration from real-life players in the drug game. The novel’s first adaptation was a telenovela by the same name starring Kate del Castillo—and if the actress’s name sounds familiar, it’s because you probably heard about her earlier this year: she was the one who introduced Sean Penn to the infamous drug lord El Chapo, whom he interviewed for a splashy, controversial article in Rolling Stone.

Naturally, with a backstory like that, Vanity Fair had to speak with Queen of the South executive producer David Friendly to find out where USA’s new show fits in.

Queen of the South follows a charismatic protagonist named Teresa (Alice Braga) whose desirability belies her true asset—a cunning, ruthless mind. As the American pilot opens, Teresa paces and preens in her pristine, Cribs-worthy mansion and discusses her drug kingpin—er, queenpin—philosophy via voiceover. Then, right before our eyes, she’s assassinated by a single gunshot through her window. Her death sends us plunging back into the past to find out how she got here.

Friendly said when he came across La Reina del Sur three years ago, he knew he wanted to make a show out of it. He contacted Telemundo, which ran its own 63-episode adaptation in 2011, and was told that the English-language rights had to be acquired from the novel’s author, __ Arturo Pérez-Reverte.__

According to Friendly, getting the author’s go-ahead was no cakewalk.

“For about a year, literally, I spoke to his agent in Spain every day begging him to let me make an offer for the English rights to the book,” Friendly said. “I thought it was a terrific story.” Eventually, his relentless perseverance won out: “They got tired of my phone calls, I think, so they allowed me to option the book.”

As the show made its three-plus-year journey to the screen, two big events catapulted Telemundo’s adaptation, its female lead, and some of the narrative’s key inspirations into the spotlight. This January, Rolling Stone ran Sean Penn’s interview with El Chapo. The drug lord, whose real name is Joaquín Archivaldo Guzmán Loera, runs the Sinaloa cartel in Mexico—where Queen of the South’s protagonist is from. El Chapo has escaped prison in Mexico twice; he was still a wanted convict in hiding when Penn interviewed him.

How on earth did Penn manage to get in touch with El Chapo? Reina del Sur star Kate del Castillo introduced them. Turns out that she and El Chapo had been in contact ever since he reached out to her, asking del Castillo to help him make a biopic about his life. Naturally, del Castillo’s involvement introduced both the actress and her telenovela to many people who had never heard of either before.

As fate would have it, the real-life Reina del Sur, whose real name is Marllory Chacón, also made headlines this year when she was implicated among others, including El Chapo, in the Panama Papers scandal.

As all of the intrigue surrounding his upcoming series’s real-life and fictional influences unfolded, Friendly said, “I was certainly aware of what was going on, and I was fascinated.” But in the end, he considered himself nothing more than an “interested observer.”

“It really had nothing to do with our show and what we were doing,” Friendly said. Instead, his focus remained on one thing: making his adaptation as good as it could possibly be, especially for its underserved Hispanic audience.