Amanda Cárcamo's costume design for Netflix's Man on Fire

Twenty-five years in the costume department, and Amanda Cárcamo still talks about Man on Fire like it caught her off guard. "There are projects that just take your heart," she told us recently. "This is one of them." The Netflix series, which follows John Creasy (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) through a raw, grounded revenge thriller set in Rio de Janeiro, demanded something rare from its costume designer : a complete visual transplant of one Latin American city onto another.

Building Rio de Janeiro from Mexico City, one fabric at a time

The central challenge Cárcamo faced on Man on Fire was both geographical and cultural. The series shoots in Mexico City, yet every frame had to breathe Rio. As a Mexican designer, she knew exactly how easy it would be to slip into familiar visual territory — and how costly that mistake would be. "I had to really take my head out of Mexico and go into Brazil," she explained. The two countries share a Latin pulse, but the details diverge sharply.

Her research process was exhaustive. She didn't just consult reference books or production archives. She watched Instagram accounts run by favela residents — real people documenting their own fashion, their hairdos, their brand preferences. She revisited Cidade de Deus (City of God), the 2002 Fernando Meirelles classic, not to copy it, but to absorb the visual logic of favela life, then update it for the present day. "The favelas in that film are from the time the movie was shot," she noted. "We needed what's going on right now."

To bridge that gap, Cárcamo worked in parallel with a team based in Brazil throughout production. They exchanged references constantly, with her Brazilian contacts flagging current trends — which flip-flops the kids actually wear, what's selling in the markets, which chains signal status in the favela. That last detail surprised even her : "Some pictures, I thought, oh my God, maybe this is too over the top. These really big chains with lots of diamonds." She added them to the mood board anyway. Authenticity demanded it.

She also visited Brazil in person during pre-production, walking through markets and favela neighborhoods. "Arriving in Brazil, I was seeing the real people," she recalled. That trip confirmed what months of remote research had built — the mood board was right. The carioca energy, that specific Rio street vibe, was finally translatable onto a Mexican set.

Dressing Creasy : color as a narrative arc

For Yahya Abdul-Mateen II's character, every wardrobe decision tracked his psychological state. Cárcamo treated color not as decoration but as a storytelling device. The approach unfolded in deliberate stages, coordinated closely with director Steven Caple Jr. for the opening episodes.

Creasy arrives from the United States in a visual shell of grays and neutrals — cold tones, American winter clothes, a silhouette that signals withdrawal and damage. "We had to really think about a silhouette for him," Cárcamo explained. "Not take out the colors, make it gray, make him really in a down mood." The shape mattered as much as the shade : a readable outline even at a distance, something the first director specifically requested.

As Creasy embeds himself in Rio, the wardrobe opens up. Shorts replace trousers. Colors he would never have worn stateside start appearing. At one point, he ties a T-shirt around his head — a gesture pulled directly from photos her Brazilian team sent over. It reads as spontaneous; it was entirely researched. That's the discipline behind Cárcamo's instincts : nothing on screen is accidental.

• Gray, structured layers for Creasy's arrival from the US
• Progressive introduction of warm tones as he settles into Rio
• Lightweight fabrics and local streetwear brands in favela sequences
• T-shirt-as-headwear detail sourced from Brazilian field research

Adaptability, solidarity, and what keeps a costume department running

On a production the scale of Man on Fire, no shooting day goes exactly as planned. A scene budgeted for 20 background actors becomes 50. A cast member changes their mind on set. A location shifts at the last minute, and suddenly the prison sequence needs three times the wardrobe pieces. Cárcamo describes this as the permanent condition of the job — not an exception, just the rhythm.

"You have to reinvent, be assertive, and get them in the mood and make it happen," she said. Her response to that instability is methodical : age garments faster, redistribute pieces, keep the team's energy up. She's been doing this for 25 years, with credits including Like Water for Chocolate and a contribution to Alfonso Cuarón's Roma. That experience doesn't make the chaos smaller — it just makes her faster inside it.

Beyond the logistics, Cárcamo is openly concerned about the state of the industry in Mexico and globally. Work has contracted. Colleagues share pieces between productions to keep budgets alive. Her response is community-driven : talk to each other, lend what you can, stop treating opportunities as zero-sum. "I'm nothing without my team, nothing," she said flatly. It's not a humble-brag — it's a structural observation. A costume designer without a strong department, a production designer, or a director who knows how to guide actors is simply not functional.

For anyone tracking ambitious Netflix productions that push visual craftsmanship — including upcoming animated projects like Brad Bird's Ray Gunn — Man on Fire stands as proof that costume design shapes narrative reality just as powerfully as cinematography or score. Cárcamo's work on this series makes that case without needing to argue it. The clothes just do the talking.