Raúl De Molina met thousands of celebrities and notables during his career as a Univision anchor El Gordo y la Flaca — which is the longest-running information-entertainment talk show with the same two hosts in the history of television.
The one thing that De Molina, 64, says always excites him, after 25 years on the show? How much fun guests are having – even if the show wasn’t on their radar to begin with – and how popular it is in Spanish-speaking markets around the world.
Molina recalls the first time Eva Mendes, born in Miami to Cuban parents, was on the show.
“She was already very popular in Hollywood, at the height of her career. But the reason she told us she came on our show was because her grandmother told her she wasn’t considered famous in the Spanish market until she was on El Gordo Y La Flaca,” De Molina says. “She told me, ‘My grandmother is watching from home and she’s so happy I’m here.'”
He adds: “We also had Hillary Clinton in 2016 when she ran for president. At first she wasn’t sure if she would come, but then we ended up laughing and dancing for a full hour,” he says with a laugh.
The series (its name translates to ‘Fat and Skinny’) is co-hosted by Lili Estefan, the niece of music producer Emilio Estefan and his wife Gloria Estefan, and recently filmed special episodes in Disneyland to celebrate the 25th. In early 2024, the hosts will receive stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
De Molina notes that he actually started out as a newspaper photojournalist, but later turned to shooting celebrities a bit by accident.
“All I ever wanted to do was take photos,” he says of his early career. “It was the 1980s, and Miami was a very rough place then, with drug dealers and riots. I was freelancing and getting all these pictures Newsweek and American news.”
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“Miami Vicewith Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas, he started shooting down here, and I started getting a lot of requests to get pictures of Don Johnson,” De Molina recalls. “Soon I became a paparazzi following those two around and taking pictures of them every day .” Those photos led to jobs shooting subjects like Princess Diana, Princess Caroline and Madonna.
De Molina was then invited to appear on talk shows such as Maury Povich and Geraldo and The Joan Rivers Show to discuss familiar topics he covered, and was such an entertaining guest that it led to a job as an entertainment reporter on Telemundo.
In 1998 El Gordo Y La Flaca launched, and De Molina says he has no plans to abandon it — as long as it airs and features celebrity guests like Shakira, Salma Hayek and Bad Bunny.
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“It’s amazing that it’s lasted this long,” he says of the show. “When I first started, Hispanic entertainers didn’t want to speak Spanish. They wanted to talk in English. Now everyone wants to speak Spanish because they are proud to speak Spanish. There are 50 million Spanish speakers in the United States — and stars like Shakira and Bad Bunny have gone mainstream. Everything has changed a lot.”
El Gordo Y La Flaca airs weekdays at 4:00 PM ET on Univision.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education