How ‘La Máquina’ stars Gael García Bernal and Diego Luna ‘complement each other’ on and off the screen

When Diego Luna is on set with Gael García Bernal, he feels “as free as an actor can feel.”

It’s been 12 years since the Mexican stars shared the screen together in “Casa De Mi Padre” and now have reunited in “La Máquina,” Hulu’s first original series in Spanish.

“It’s just fun and everything comes natural,” Luna tells TODAY.com about acting with longtime friend and collaborator García Bernal. “It’s a blast.”

“La Máquina” follows aging boxer Esteban “La Máquina” Osuna (García Bernal) who loses a pivotal match and is ready to call it quits. To revitalize his career, his botox, plastic surgery, self-tanning-loving manager Andy Lujan (Luna) sets up a high-stakes match.

However, Andy gets involved with the wrong people when he has to pay back a debt that he made early in Esteban’s career.

The actors, who also serve as executive producers via their production company La Corriente del Golfo, brainstormed the idea while hungover one morning during the Berlin Film Festival. Their shared love of boxing fueled them into creating the project.

García Bernal and Luna made a name for themselves when they co-starred in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2001 film “Y Tu Mamá También.” The drama followed two friends on a roadtrip who get involved in a messy love triangle.

Before that, they bonded from a young age. Their parents worked together doing a play in Mexico. García Bernal’s father was a theater director, his mother an actress, while Luna’s mother was a costume designer and father a set designer. Acting came naturally for the two — and magic happened when they shared the screen.

“We started off in a very fortunate world of theater, then we grew up and cinema came to us, or we came to cinema,” García Bernal tells TODAY.com. “When we had the first opportunity to work together in cinema, it was a very daring and wonderful film that required a lot of our dynamic and our friendship and our artistic endeavors because we were very young back then, so we didn’t have any clarity of that.”

Adding, “It was like, ‘OK, let’s stretch those frontiers, let’s keep on experimenting and being very free.’”

The two, who also co-starred in “Rudo y Cursi,” established themselves as a dynamic duo to watch, such as Ben Affleck and Matt Damon, George Clooney and Brad Pitt, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. Along the way, the founded the Ambulante Film Festival and another production company Canana Films.

With their years of working together, some may ask how do they keep their friendship in tact. The two credit their decision to “never” get competitive with each other.

“I don’t think that way ever. Never with Gael,” Luna says. “I truly believe that we complement each other. There is no competition. In fact, I perfectly know Gael to the point where I know why exactly I’m not capable of doing anything he’s done because I know where it comes from.”

When it comes to their latest project, the two knew exactly which characters they would portray in “La Máquina.” But amid their “excitement” on set, Luna says they encountered one issue.

“We laugh a lot,” García Bernal says of their working relationship, with Luna adding that their biggest fear is “not succeeding in ending the scene, in getting to the end.”

“I know he’s going to come with something new. I know I’m going to be surprised. There’s something beautiful that gets out of control when we are together,” he says. “Which is fun, until it becomes unstoppable laughter.”

One major moment of laughter came when García Bernal saw Luna in full costume with his “big bum” and exaggerated features. It made García Bernal do a “triple take.”

“It required a kind of triple take in order to absorb (Luna in character). But it’s so amazing because once he got (into it). He appropriated it, he made it into something,” García Bernal says. “And it was very difficult to stop him because he was just all the time in character.”

There’s a scene in the second episode where the two are having an intense discussion about deals Andy has made throughout Esteban’s career. The back-and-forth highlights the actors’ comfortability with each another, despite Luna’s over-the-top prosthetics.

“That (scene) at the ring is definitely one that took us a while to finish. There is this kind of crispiness in Andy’s character when he gets mad that is really fun,” Luna says with a laugh. “Many times I saw Gael looking at me going, like, ‘What the f— are you doing?’ We had fun that day, even though the scene is not fun at all.”

García Bernal says that aside from fans seeing him and Luna reunite on screen, he’s excited for them to be “moved by the characters” and also see the people behind it.

“That is the magic of all of this,” he continues. “We have no control of that.”