From executive producers José Padilha (Elite Squad, RoboCop) and Eric Newman (Children of Men), the Netflix drama series Narcos chronicles the gripping, intense and almost unbelievable real-life stories of the infamous drug kingpins of the late 1980s and the corroborative efforts of law enforcement to meet them head-on in brutal and bloody conflict. The effort to control cocaine, one of the world’s most valuable commodities, led to legal, political, military and civilian clashes that are still unresolved, to this day.

While at the TCA Press Tour as part of the Netflix presentation, executive producers Padilha and Newman were joined by Brazilian actor Wagner Moura (Elite Squad, Elysium), who plays Pablo Escobar, and Pedro Pascal (Game of Thrones), who plays real-life DEA agent Javier Peña, to talk about the evolution of this series, how they approached the production, learning about these real life men, and the grey areas of everyone involved in this story. We’ve put together a list of 14 things that you should know about Narcos, which debuts at Netflix on August 28th.

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  This project was originally intended to be a movie, and then realized that when you get into the complexities of the drug world and the characters, with both the bad guys and the good guys, you need a lot of time to tell that story. Said executive producer Eric Newman, “Fortunately, we got into business with Netflix, and they gave us what we needed to get it done properly.”

• The structural approach to the series was to have two parallel narratives, with the DEA and the narcos. According to Newman, they had originally designed the show not just as the story of Pablo Escobar, but as a story of the efforts of the people who brought Pablo Escobar down. There’s an American aspect to the show, and also a large Colombian aspect to the law enforcement element. The design of it always was to tell both stories, as much as we can, without giving the Americans too much credit for what we did. It was important to establish that this was a Colombian effort. They did the dying. They did the real suffering to bring down Escobar.

• On one side of the story is the Medellín cartel and the story of small-time criminals, with the most important and famous one being Pablo Escobar, but also others who stumbled by chance upon a product that you can call the perfect product, which is cocaine because it’s very cheap to produce and highly addictive with incredible profit margins. Said executive producer José Padilha, “Those guys didn’t really know what they had until cocaine hit Miami. It’s almost like, if you were a fisherman, you go out in a lake and there are so many gigantic fish in the lake, but you don’t have a clue, and you throw your bait and start getting incredibly big fish. You’re just amazed at how many fish you get. That’s what happened with Pablo and money. He made money so quickly. I don’t think that’s ever happened, in the history of mankind. It’s a bigger than life story of a character.”

• On the other side of all of that wealth and power was the havoc it created in Miami. Said Padilha, “People were dying in Miami, like they die today in Rio de Janeiro. They were shooting each other. The story of how cocaine hit America and how it brought violence to America can only be narrated from the American perspective. Ronald Reagan decided to fight cocaine by fighting supply, not demand. We waged a war against drugs in Colombia, not in Miami. That’s really important, not only for the show, but for the history of drugs, drug policies and, unfortunately, for the history of failed drug policies, which is basically what we have in the U.S., Brazil and everywhere.”

• The first season of the series is 10 episodes, which the producers felt was the perfect amount of time to explore the good and bad of all of these characters. Said Newman, “One of the great things about the 10-hour format is that you can actually take characters down very dark roads, and then bring them back. In a movie, when you have two hours, somebody does something horrible and you just don’t have time to redeem them. You have to temper the type of guy that your character is. In this case, every character, at one point or another, does something that you won’t respect or like and that you will question, and then in most cases, they will come around and you will find a reason to embrace them.”

• Pablo Escobar is a character that’s had numerous representations in the past, and actor Wagner Moura wanted to fully immerse himself in the man, prior to shooting, to learn as much as he could. “It was basically the most difficult thing I have ever done, in my life, because I didn’t speak Spanish before doing the show. I flew to Medellín and stayed there, six months before the rest of the cast and before I even signed with Netflix. I booked myself in a university for a Spanish course for foreigners, and I think I’ve read basically everything that was written about Pablo Escobar and modern Colombian history. At the end of the day, it’s the actor’s view on the character. It doesn’t matter how much you had studied it or learned about him because it’s the way you see him. I can’t tell you exactly the way I see him, but it’s different.”

• In order to be authentic to Escobar’s weight gain, Maura gained 40 pounds to play him, but still had to wear a fake belly because he just could not put on enough weight to mirror Escobar. Said Padilha, “[Escobar] was always hungry because he was smoking grass the whole day long, and then, at night, he would go to the fridge and eat everything. And then, he would smoke some more grass.”

• They didn’t want to provide their own opinions on how to fix the failed drug policy that the Western world has adopted, but by showing what happens and by portraying how cocaine, in particular, has been dealt with, they think you will certainly question why there haven’t been changes in the policy. Said Padilha, “One thing is for sure and that’s that the drug policy that we have doesn’t work, and it hasn’t worked for the last 30 years, but we haven’t changed it. Obviously, it has to change because there are so many people in jail and there are so many dead bodies in the story of cocaine. I’m not saying what people should do. It’s not my business. I’m a storyteller. But I do feel that it would be really good if there was education because America basically fights cocaine by fighting supply, but the demand is always there, and the place that supplies the cocaine changes. The supply moves around, the demand remains the same, and people die in this process.”

• From an actor’s perspective, the more you learn about the business of cocaine, the less black and white it all becomes. In talking about all of the shades of grey, actor Pedro Pascal said, “We’re not going down to bust a drug dealer. We’re going down to fight a war. All of the shapes become more blurry, in terms of what the right thing to do is and what the right way to do it is. This guy that I’m playing, Javier Pe a, is a living DEA agent who just retired in January 2014. I came to understand it that the best way to get his job done is to understand how blurry the lines become. It just becomes such a personal agenda from so many different perspectives that you don’t even know what the right thing is anymore. I couldn’t even begin to understand what could have been done differently.”

• When it comes to the drug business, it seems as though there are nothing but grey areas, as both sides push the boundaries of right and wrong. Said Maura, “This is not a show about good American cops that go to a Third World country to save poor people from a bad guy. We took very good care for it to be respectful with Columbian history and with what really happened, though it’s fiction. I like the fact that this is not regular cop/bad guy show.” Padilha went on to add, “Nobody is good in the show. One of the things that Pablo Escobar did was blow up a plane. He put a bomb in a plane to kill one person, and he brought the whole plane down. That is clearly an evil person, a terrorist and a sociopath. That doesn’t mean he can’t have a soft side with his family. We tried to steer away from caricatures, and we wanted to explore the idea of unintended consequences. You tried to do something good, and you ended up doing something bad.”

• During his preparation for the film, Pascal was able to go out to Quantico with co-star Boyd Holbrook, who plays Steve Murphy, and meet up with the actual counterparts of the characters that they’re playing. Said Pascal, “We went into some training. They had their fun with us actors. We were these little schmucks that thought we were going to be like cool DEA agents, and they held guns to our head and stuff like that. We hung out and shared some stories. It’s the first opportunity I’ve ever had to play somebody who is actually alive, and he’s somebody who was down there, really on the ground floor of things. He’s Mexican American, so he’s fluent in Spanish, and he really got in there.”

• One thing Pascal could relate to with this project was the size and epic scope of the story that they’re telling, having worked on one of the most epic series ever on television with Game of Thrones. “I think they’re very comparable to one another. The way this story exists in our collective understanding, it’s actually really quite Game of Thrones. I would say that Game of Thrones would take a lot of inspiration from the story of what went down in Columbia and the kind of war that was fought. Also, in seeing the episodes so visually captured, it does make we think a little bit about Game of Thrones. I remember getting to Croatia and shooting over the Adriatic Sea and thinking, as a fan of the show, that it was CGI. I thought that it was a good green screen. So, my physical experience is similar, in that respect, where I am in these locations where what you’re seeing is actually what you’re getting. We don’t need dragons. We’ve got cocaine.”

• Just like Elite Squad was inspired by Goodfellas, of which Padilha is a big fan, this series is, as well. Padilha said, “There’s no reason for me to shy away from it. [In Goodfellas], Henry takes the audience into the world of the mafia and tells the audience the complexities of that world. We have two characters that are DEA agents, taking the audience into the world of cocaine and into the world of Columbia. It actually suits the Goodfellas model perfectly.

• Because Escobar documented himself so well, there were a lot of pictures with outfits that they could reproduce, quite a few of which are represented in the series. They also used some of the real-life archival footage, so they had to match everything, from the clothes they wore to the type of mustaches they had, in order to cut from real life to their representation. They feel it made a story that is so impossible to believe seem as real as it was.

All ten episodes of Narcos will premiere on Netflix on August 28th at 12:01am PST.