Hulu is turning the family life around Pablo Escobar into a new series, and this time the story is told through the eyes of his son. Dear Killer Nannies shifts the focus to Juan Pablo Escobar, also known as Juampi, with John Leguizamo starring alongside Janer Villareal, who plays a teenage Juan Pablo.
The series draws from real events that began inside one of the most violent criminal empires in modern history. Escobar’s fortune was estimated to have reached as high as $30 billion at the peak of his cartel power, and his son said the family sometimes went hungry because they were often on the run. He was born on Feb. 24, 1977, and said he learned the truth about his father’s work at age 7, when Pablo Escobar sat him down and told him he was a bandit and that was how he made a living.
Juan Pablo Escobar has said his father had no problem watching the news with him, reading newspapers and magazines, and answering questions about killings, bombings and other crimes with blunt certainty. “Yes, I am responsible for this,” he would say at times, or “I’m not.” That matter-of-fact cruelty is part of what makes the new Hulu project more than another retelling of the drug war. It comes from a family member who lived inside the fear, wealth and damage that made the name pablo escobar known around the world.
That home life also left behind the detail that now sounds almost unreal: at age 14, Juan Pablo Escobar was given a Ferrari Testarossa, a car now valued at more than $565,000. At the same time, Pablo Escobar assigned hired assassins to act as babysitters to protect his son, and the experiences of those men inspired the Hulu series. The show is based on the real-life accounts of Juan Pablo Escobar and the assassins who were assigned to watch over him, giving the drama a perspective that comes from inside the orbit of the cartel boss rather than from the police or the politicians who pursued him.
After Pablo Escobar’s death in 1993, Juan Pablo Escobar and his mother, Maria Victoria Henao, moved to Argentina and assumed new identities. He later became Sebastián Marroquín, studied architecture and industrial design in Buenos Aires and struggled to find work while trying to move beyond his father’s shadow. Even that break did not last. Juan Pablo Escobar and Henao were later arrested and imprisoned on money-laundering charges after an accountant discovered their true identities and tried to extort them. He said they went to police for help and were jailed anyway, a reversal he described as proof that it looked better for authorities to put the Escobars in jail than to help them, even though he said they were victims of a crime.
He was released in 2006 after a ruling by Argentina’s Supreme Court, and he went on to build a public-speaking career warning young people about drug trafficking. He has also advocated for the legalization of cocaine as a way to weaken cartels, reached out to several of his father’s victims to apologize, and published the memoir Pablo Escobar: My Father in 2014. His latest book, the illustrated comic Escobar: Una Educación Criminal, was released in 2025. Dear Killer Nannies arrives after years in which the Pablo Escobar story has remained a global obsession, including Netflix’s Narcos from 2015 to 2017, but the new Hulu series pushes the focus inward, toward the son who has spent his adult life trying to explain what it meant to grow up at the center of that violence.
