Karla Coronado & Julia Maqueo Talk NO ME SIGAS and Influencer Horror

By Shannon McGrew

In Blumhouse’s first Spanish-language original film, NO ME SIGAS, from directors Ximena Garcia Lecuona and Eduardo Lecuona, aspiring influencer Carla (Karla Coronado), who is obsessed with going viral with her videos of ghost and paranormal events, moves into a famous haunted building. There, she begins faking ghostly apparitions to gain more followers, unaware that a real evil entity resides in her apartment and will torment her until no one, not even she, can distinguish what’s real and what isn’t. 

For the release of NO ME SIGAS, Creepy Kingdom’s Shannon McGrew spoke with actors Karla Coronado, who plays aspiring influencer Carla, and Julia Maqueo, who plays her best friend Sam, a successful influencer already living the fame Carla craves. During their chat, they discussed the film's exploration of friendship and ambition, the blurred line between performance and reality in the age of social media, and the eerie moments from set that made the story feel all too real.

Thank you both for speaking with me today. When you first read the script, what stood out about the tension between your characters, especially with that influencer power balance?

Karla Coronado: Sam becomes the prize I want. She becomes the influencer that I want to become. But at the same time, she’s my friend, and it becomes weird. I love that it questions a lot of things about who you are willing to become to get all the fame that you want. At the same time, what is a friendship, and why are you willing to let it go if you need to become famous? That’s what stood out from the script for me. 

Julia Maqueo: With Sam, it was the opposite. There’s this friendship, and though it doesn’t say it in the movie, I think this friendship goes back a long time. They are very different people, but as Karla says, Sammy is everything that Carla wants to be. She approaches Sam about that specifically, and though Sam is not the greatest friend, she tries to do everything she can for her friend, even though it feels like she doesn’t want to. I think Carla and Sam were really good friends, that’s why when everything’s happening, Sam is still sending her messages like, ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ Even if she’s mad, I think it’s because she is worried about her friend. 

A lot of the horror in the film comes from not knowing what’s staged for social media likes and what’s real, which makes it thrilling to follow along. What helped you both in playing with that uncertainty? 

Karla Coronado: It helped a lot working with the directors who were next to us all the time. There were two directors, and one of them was the writer, so being available to talk to them and having them with us all the time really helped us understand how our characters behave, how they distinguish between reality and fiction, and what they would do with it. It was definitely the directors working together as partners. 

Julia Maqueo: They gave us a lot of creativity with our characters, and they were with us all the time, every day. 

With this film, your characters are playing around with rituals in hopes of being noticed online. Did anything scary happen to either of you or others while filming? 

Karla Coronado: A lot of things happened! I was doing a love scene with Yankel Stevan, and our characters were talking about beautiful things, and then we were invoking ghosts, and two of the frames that were hanging next to us fell when we were invoking those ghosts. Then, of course, we heard things in the hallways. We were shooting in these very historic and famous places in Mexico City, which have many haunted stories. So, of course, everyone had a story about what happened to them during the night. 

In making this film, has it changed how either of you thinks about being watched online or chasing online validation?

Julia Maqueo: Since the beginning of social media, there’s been a lot of fake people out there, but also, there are a lot of great people. I think you can see it in Carla in what she is willing to do just to feel seen, and that’s really scary. Even more than a ghost [Laughs].

Karla Coronado: It makes me, Karla, not the character, question what I’m willing to do to get those likes. Where is the line between performative and intimate life? What would be the line that you wouldn’t cross? This movie makes me question those things. 

NO ME SIGAS is now streaming on Hulu.