Actors crisscrossing the border

LOS ANGELES - A few years ago, Eugenio Derbez, Mexico's most popular comic actor, got some well-meaning advice from a Hollywood executive that still makes him smile.

Derbez was playing a key secondary role in Patricia Riggen's Under the Same Moon, a Fox Searchlight drama about a Mexican mother, played by Kate del Castillo, forced to leave her young son in her native village while she searches for work in Los Angeles. Derbez's otherwise serious character had a couple of lighthearted moments in the movie, and the studio honcho was impressed.

"He told me, 'You should try comedy, because I think you have a lot of potential,' " recalled Derbez, now 48, who by that point had written, produced, or starred in many Mexican TV shows, including the long-running sitcom Vecinos (Neighbors). He was also well known to U.S. Latinos for numerous TV and movie roles, notably as the goofy patriarch of the comically dysfunctional La Familia P. Luche (The Plush Family), which originated on Mexican TV and became a hit for the Miami-based Spanish-language Univision Network.

"It was so funny," Derbez said good-naturedly. "It was like if somebody in Mexico said to Jim Carrey, 'You ought to be a comedian!' "

Hollywood is getting better acquainted with the varied talents of Derbez and other prominent actors from Mexico, who increasingly are turning up in U.S.-made movies and high-rated TV shows such as Telemundo's La Reina del Sur and the Venevision-Univision coproduced Eva Luna, as well as in advertisements, award ceremonies, and on theater stages.

Derbez, for example, cohosted fall's Latin Grammy Awards in Las Vegas, appears in the coming film Jack and Jill with Adam Sandler and Katie Holmes, and recently visited Los Angeles to film a CBS comedy pilot starring Rob Schneider as a lifelong bachelor who marries into a close-knit Mexican American family. He also starred in last year's romantic comedy No Eres Tu, Soy Yo (I'm Not You, I'm Me), a huge hit in Mexico.

If the unnamed CBS comedy gets green-lighted, Derbez plans to uproot his family this summer and move to the United States, joining a growing number of L.A.-based, brand-name Mexican actors working in Spanish and English on both sides of the border. "For me it would be a big change but worth it," Derbez said.