Latino Migrant Pain Is the Secret Weapon of Apple TV's 'Pluribus': Carlos-Manuel Vesga Reveals What Fuels Manousos Rage

When Pluribus hit Apple TV this year, it didn't just arrive as another prestige drama. It landed as a philosophical provocation: what happens to human beings when the very rules of society, economics, morality, and identity are rewritten on the fly? Created by Vince Gilligan, the storyteller behind Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, the series places its characters inside an intangible grid of power and rebellion, where adaptation can feel like betrayal, and resistance can spiral into self-destruction.

In the crosshairs of that swirl is Manousos, a man who embodies the oldest kind of refusal: he simply will not bend.

And behind that refusal stands Carlos-Manuel Vesga, whose quietly magnetic performance anchors one of the most talked-about figures of Pluribus. In a recent conversation with The Latin Times and ENSTARZ, Vesga explained how he approaches a character whose resistance is not stubbornness for its own sake but a profound refusal to lose what little stability he has left.

"I don't think he's a dangerous man," Vesga said. "I think he's a determined man. A man with very strict principles, who knows very clearly what's right and what's wrong." It's something clear in everyone of his scenes, including his interactions with Carol Sturka, the fantasy-romance writer played by Golden Globes nominee Rhea Seehorn.

In the world of Pluribus, the rules are being rewritten by unseen forces, presenting a new reality where old moral compasses no longer point true north. Some characters adapt. Some prosper. Some vanish. Manousos chooses a third path: he resists.

The scripts establish early that Manousos is a Colombian immigrant living in Paraguay, a detail Vesga treats as the emotional bedrock of the character. For him, that migration isn't an incidental backstory. It's the crucible that shaped Manousos' worldview.

"That means he had to emigrate. He already had to leave a life behind," Vesga explained. "Migration, no matter the circumstances, always implies loss, pain, fear, trauma. This guy has already been through that."

Gilligan's landscape is bleak but never barren of meaning: characters are tested by an unpredictable system that rewards adaptability and punishes inertia. Manousos' refusal to accept the new reality, even when logic and safety point in the opposite direction, becomes one of the series' most unsettling tensions.

Vesga was deliberate in building this interiority. Rather than inventing a detailed criminal history or forced psychological complexity, he worked with what the story gave him—and trusted the emotional truth beneath. "I didn't want to invent anything for him," Vesga told us. "What I know already informs the character deeply." That restraint is what makes Manousos feel like a man shaped by lived experience, not by exposition.

That restraint becomes cinematic poetry in one of Pluribus' most talked-about scenes: Manousos sets his own yellow car on fire rather than let it be taken from him. It's not dramatic for drama's sake. It's a gesture born of irrevocable loss.

"That car is small, it looks delicate, but it's brave," Vesga remembered with a wry smile. "I saw the entire personality of the character in it. Burning it was hard."

Then, as if life were echoing art, Vesga ran into an identical vehicle during filming in the Canary Islands. His reaction was almost surreal.

"It felt like a telenovela," he laughed. "Like someone who dies in an explosion and suddenly comes back. I thought, 'You're still alive?'"

That glimpsed absurdity is exactly the space Pluribus likes to occupy: a world where the familiar feels uncanny, and the rules you thought you knew no longer apply.

For Vesga himself, the transition to Pluribus was also a professional elevation. A Colombian actor who cut his teeth in novelas, he deliberately expanded his craft into film and international television. What remains from his early career is a discipline for holding silence, for letting interior conflict speak louder than any monologue.

In Pluribus, that discipline becomes Manousos' defining trait: a man who already lost his world once, who rebuilt it quietly, and now refuses, even in the face of an altered universe, to let go again.

"This time, no. No more," Vesga said, encapsulating the character's bedrock philosophy.

In an industry still learning how to depict Latino characters with psychological depth rather than stereotype, Víctor Manuel Vesga offers something rare: a performance rooted in empathy, resilience, and moral certainty. Manousos does not ask to be understood. He simply stands his ground, defying reality itself.

The last episode of the first season of Pluribus drops on Wednesday, December 24th. The series has already been renewed for two more seasons.

Originally published on Latin Times