“People jump in, you jump in. That’s the rule.” So says one of high schooler Miguel’s punch-happy pals at the start of Hulu’s bawdy comedy flick Miguel Wants to Fight (premiering August 16). But Miguel (Tyler Dean Flores, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier) has never jumped in.
That realization is a shock to his three best friends—ex-boxer David (Christian Vunipola), scrappy Cass (Imani Lewis), and sharp-tongued Srini (Suraj Partha)—who swear they’ve seen the guy throw at least one punch. Later, when Miguel gets the upsetting news that he’s moving hours away from Syracuse with his family, he decides to try to get into his first fight instead of telling his friends. Conveniently, he lives in a neighborhood where everyone, and we mean everyone, is always getting into a scrap.
“Miguel is surrounded by fighting. That’s something we wanted to enforce, even in the murals that he walks by,” director Oz Rodriguez says. “But he only likes fighting [in films].”
And though Miguel has lined his bedroom with Jackie Chan and other action film posters (he imagines himself as Bruce Lee and in Matrix-like scenarios in campy interludes) and spends time cleaning up in his dad’s (Raúl Castillo) boxing gym, the teen is no natural. Plus, he’s picking fights with all the wrong people.
For advice, he goes to his menacing neighbor Armando (Insecure’s Sarunas J. Jackson) and has a surprising conversation with the former boxer, who just got out of prison. His advice should deter him. Yet Miguel continues with his misguided plans to find a worthy opponent, creating new problems with nearly everyone he cares about along the way.
“I [was] thinking about the idea of teenage boys dealing with their emotions and violence, and reaching that level of maturity to just talk to your friends,” Rodriguez notes. “Because if Miguel would’ve been emotionally available and told his friends he was moving, there would be no movie.”
Thankfully, Miguel’s homies have his back…for the most part. “It’s a movie about friendship and how important friends are, especially at this stage,” the Saturday Night Live and A.P. Bio director adds. “Certainly, for me, some of the friends I made at that age are still friends for life.”
Although Miguel manages to evade any truly harmful altercations for much of the film, Flores did fight training for about a month and a half. Recalls Rodriguez: “Most of my texts [to him] were, ‘Stretch your legs—you’re going to be doing a lot of kicking!’”
Miguel Wants to Fight, Original Movie Premiere, Wednesday, August 16, Hulu