José Andrés

Mads Mikkelsen needed to learn how to carve human flesh without blinking in front of the lens. In 2013, the creator Bryan Fuller picked up the phone and signed the Asturian José Andrés as head culinary consultant for the series Hannibal. That decision changed the visual texture of genre television, because the killer's cannibal banquets had to look like haute French cuisine, not cheap B-movie gore.

Andrés designed dishes with glazed lamb lungs, marinated tongues and beef cuts presented as human thigh pieces. He supervised the shine of the sauces under tungsten lights and corrected the hand positioning of the Danish actor in every close-up shot.

That was no cardboard-and-plaster set.

His fascination with visual storytelling was something the chef had carried for a long time. In 2005, Televisión Española gave him the mornings of La 1 with the show Vamos a cocinar. That program broke the stiffness of classic cooking formats: Andrés cooked at full volume, looked straight into the camera as if it were a buddy leaning on the bar, and filled the screen with real splatter.

He taped more than two hundred episodes in three years, with ratings that came close to a 20 percent audience share. But the Prado del Rey set was becoming too small for him, and his relationship with the television industry was only just getting started.

From the Red Carpet to Ground Zero

In February 2019, he took the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles during the 91st Academy Awards. He joined actor Diego Luna to present footage from Roma, the black-and-white feature film directed by Alfonso Cuarón.

In front of more than twenty-nine million live viewers, he seized the microphone to deliver a blunt speech in support of migrant communities. The studio executives understood at that exact moment that this man had a rare stage presence for someone outside the acting profession.

And the screen demanded more footage.

In 2021, he founded the company José Andrés Media in Los Angeles with the goal of producing nonfiction audiovisual projects without intermediaries. The company signed co-production deals with established studios to reach global streaming platforms.

In 2022, director Ron Howard took the helm of the documentary feature We Feed People, produced by Imagine Documentaries for National Geographic and Disney+. Howard followed the Asturian for months through climate disasters and supply crises to document the emergency logistics of his organization, World Central Kitchen.

The cameras caught the chef sending up lines of fire amid the rubble left by Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, or dodging floods in North Carolina. The final cut competed on the international festival circuit and earned two Emmy nominations in sound and directing categories.

Howard dispensed with the usual tropes of the institutional promotional film. He preferred to film the logistical chaos, the tensions on set and the mud stuck to the soles of the crew's boots.

The business of telling the after-dinner story

In late 2022, the six-episode series José Andrés and Family in Spain premiered, produced with the British company Nutopia for Discovery+ and HBO Max. The shoot covered locations in Barcelona, Andalusia, Valencia, Asturias and the arid landscapes of Lanzarote, along with his three daughters, who were raised in the United States.

The show's pace set aside the urgency of disasters to embrace the relaxed photography of travel documentaries. The camera mixed wide shots with wide-angle lenses and casual conversations around family tables.

The American market bought the formula right away.

So in March 2024, he greenlit the special Dinner Party Diaries with José Andrés for the Prime Video catalog. The format brought together top-tier performers such as Jamie Lee Curtis, Bryan Cranston and O'Shea Jackson Jr. in a real kitchen.

The production was handled with a multicamera setup of five digital bodies in a single indoor space with no commercial breaks. The lighting mimicked the warm glow of a home dinner using 35-millimeter fixed-focal-length lenses designed to capture the guests' spontaneous reactions.

A misalignment in the overhead framing during the final plating forced a re-carving of an entire piece of meat and cost eight hundred dollars in fresh product before the quartz lights were switched off.