Pablo Escobar's Son Reveals What It Was Like Growing Up Among Narcos: The Real Story Behind 'Dear Killer Nannies' - INTERVIEWS

Juan Pablo Escobar Henao spent years trying to distance himself from the legacy of his father, Pablo Escobar. Over time, he understood that escaping that history was impossible. So he chose a different path: telling the truth about it. Not to glorify one of the world's most notorious criminals, but to reveal what life inside the Escobar family was really like and to push back against the way television and film have often turned that violence into spectacle.

That is what Escobar Henao told this reporter in 2016, when he released his memoir Pablo Escobar, My Father. Now, he is taking that mission to an even bigger audience with Hulu's Dear Killer Nannies, a new series based on his experience growing up around narcos. At the center of the project is the message he has spent years trying to make clear: there is nothing cool, glamorous, or enviable about being a criminal.

In all truth, there is no shortage of stories about Pablo Escobar, the creator and leader of the Medellín Cartel, starting with Netflix's Narcos. What there has not been, until now, is a major scripted series that looks at him first through the eyes of the son who loved him. That is the emotional engine behind Dear Killer Nannies, starred by John Leguizamo and inspired by the childhood of Escobar Henao, now known as Sebastián Marroquín. This is also why the project lands so differently from the narco dramas that came before it.

In a joint interview with the Latin Times, creator Sebastián Ortega and star Janer Villarreal said that was the entire point. "Having the opportunity to tell it from within the family nucleus, something that had never happened before," explained Ortega, explaining that previous stories had come from "people outside the family." What interested him, he added, was telling it "from the point of view of a child" who, over the course of the series, becomes a teenager and discovers that the father he loves is "one of the worst criminals in the world."

That child was not a passive witness to history. Juan Pablo Escobar Henao was born on Feb. 24, 1977. When Pablo Escobar was killed in Medellín on Dec. 2, 1993, he was 16 years old. That detail matters because Dear Killer Nannies is not simply the story of an innocent boy too young to understand what was happening around him. It is also the story of a teenager old enough to grasp the horror of his father's world while still being emotionally bound to him.

Premiering on April 1, the series follows "Juampi" as he faces "the burden of his surname" and must decide whether to continue the family legacy or "start a new life from scratch."

Juan Pablo himself has been explicit about why he wanted this version told. "I had already gone through books, documentaries, and a lot of stories about my father, and I felt this was the moment to tell my personal story, Juan Pablo's story, the story of the child, the little boy, and the teenager, and the decisions and traumatic moments I went through," he said when presenting the series. "I felt I had the opportunity to tell a very different perspective on my father's story."

That perspective is rooted in an unsettling detail that gives the series its title. During the height of Pablo Escobar's power, some of the men assigned to protect Juan Pablo were assassins from the Medellín Cartel who effectively doubled as babysitters. These so-called "nannies" were hitmen entrusted with watching the cartel boss's only son, an arrangement that captures the contradiction of his childhood better than any amount of crime-scene spectacle ever could.

Villarreal, the Colombian actor who plays Juan Pablo as a teenager, spoke candidly about the weight of inhabiting that contradiction. There was always a constant need to approach it responsibly," he said, calling the subject "very sensitive."

Villarreal said he took on the role with "Juan Pablo's guidance because I had him very close in order to understand his account" and from "a place of empathy" because "to understand, you have to empathize."

That emotional rigor is central to why the series feels different. Villarreal said the project forced him to become"Much more aware of the scars and pain this episode caused" in Colombia, and that it helped him understand "from another point of view the pain my country has suffered." In other words, this is not a performance built around imitation or mythology. It is built around trauma, memory and the question of what survives inside a child long after the gunfire stops.

Crime doesn't pay

After Escobar was killed, Escobar Henao fled Colombia with his mother, María Victoria Henao, and his sister Manuela. The family eventually settled in Buenos Aires under new identities, and Juan Pablo became Sebastián Marroquín. In Argentina he studied architecture and industrial design, later becoming an architect, author, and public speaker. He also struggled to find work because of his identity, and in the years that followed, he publicly apologized to some of his father's victims and tried to redirect the conversation around his family name.

That long project of reckoning is inseparable from Dear Killer Nannies. Marroquín has spent years criticizing the glamorization of Pablo Escobar in popular culture. He blasted Narcos for inaccuracies and later wrote books and a 2025 graphic novel, Escobar: Una Educación Criminal, that helped inspire the new series. In that book rollout, he made his position crystal clear. "I raise awareness, Netflix glorifies," he said.

Ortega echoed that philosophy in his conversation with Latin Times, but with an artist's formulation. This story, he said, "deserved to be told" in a way that honored the truth and created reflection, leaving behind "a clear message that violence doesn't lead anywhere good," he added. ""Throughout the entire series, you never see a brick of cocaine," despite the fact that it is about "the biggest drug trafficker in history," because "that is not the focus. The focus is the child's point of view."

That may be the boldest creative choice the series makes. It understands that showing Pablo Escobar as a father does not redeem him. If anything, it makes him more disturbing. The domestic intimacy does not soften the violence. It reveals how deeply it invades everyday life, how it reshapes childhood, and how a boy can grow up surrounded by privilege, affection, terror and death all at once.

That is the real story behind Dear Killer Nannies. Not the rise of a capo the world already knows, but the "private" education of the son who had to survive him.