executive producer & senior director TIM SNOW @snowmgz
creative director RAINE BASCOS
photographer COYOTE PARK coyotepark.format.com @coyotepark
1st assistant MASON ROSE masonrose.photography @masonrose__
light tech EVADNE GONZALEZ @evadnegonzalez
digitech MERLIN VIETHEN
video AUSTIN NUNES austinunes.com @austinunes
producer STEVIE WILLIAMS x2production.com @beingstevie of X2 Production
set designer ORRIN WHALEN orrinwhalen.com @orrinwhalen
stylist EDWIN ORTEGA edwinortega.com @edwin.j.ortega
hair/groomer ABRAHAM ESPARZA abrahamjesparza.com @thisisbabe
manicurist RILEY MIRANDA @rileymiranda.nails
Tarlos is here — and ready to take over.
Coined by fans of Fox’s hit procedural drama 9-1-1: Lone Star, the affectionate “ship” name is a portmanteau of the show’s queer main characters: firefighter-turned-paramedic Tyler Kennedy “T.K.” Strand and Carlos Reyes, an Austin police officer. The LGBTQ-inclusive series centers on the lives of emergency responders and also boasts names like Rob Lowe, Liv Tyler, and transgender actor Brian Michael Smith.
Watching Lone Star, which opens a fourth season in early 2023, it’s easy to see why fans love Tarlos. Their relationship — which began in the pilot episode in an Austin honky-tonk and evolved into a roller coaster of casual hookups, breaking up, moving in together, and eventually getting engaged — is a story LGBTQ+ fans could only dream about seeing on network television just a few years ago. Seeing these two characters — with their movie-star good looks and boys-next-door appeal — navigate life and love in relatable ways gives fans giddy feelings with every new episode (which is why discussions of Lone Star continually trend on Twitter during the television season).
Fortunately, out actors Ronen Rubinstein and Rafael L. Silva have the chemistry to bring these two Lone Star boys to life.
“I can’t imagine doing this with somebody that (a) you don’t like and (b) you don’t mesh well with on set,” Rubinstein says of Silva. Since they started this journey as Tarlos when Lone Star premiered in 2020, the two have grown close as both colleagues and friends. “I can’t imagine doing that with somebody that you don’t get along with and you don’t respect and you don’t love as a human being,” he adds. “I can honestly say that’s how I feel about Rafael.”
“Ro and I are just so fucking different as people…. But it’s this sort of yin and yang thing,” says Silva. “Two of the same pieces of the same puzzle are not going to go together, they’re just not. They have to be different in order to complement each other, and I think we do that very well as actors and as people.”
One of the first scenes the two shot together was a sex scene, and like with any intimacy on camera, that required a lot of trust — even if at the time, they had just recently met. But the two used their real-life newness with each other to their advantage, as it paralleled how T.K. and Carlos were also just getting to know each other, creating a realistic pairing that the stans simply can’t get enough of.
“At that point, when you have a bunch of people just watching you make out and do that, you have to rely on your partner,” Silva says. “It’s like we only got each other right now, so let’s just do whatever happens here, just go with the flow. Let’s just go.”
The confidence and chemistry of Tarlos is one of television’s better examples of an LGBTQ+ couple just getting to live their messy but meaningful lives without extreme trauma keeping them apart. A couple like Tarlos was a portrayal Rubinstein and Silva didn’t see a lot of growing up, and that helped motivate them to portray T.K. and Carlos in a way never before seen by generations of queer TV watchers.
Silva, who was born in Brazil and spent the early part of his childhood there, says he was raised in a very male-dominated, machismo-drenched culture with a stigma surrounding gay people. It wasn’t until he was a young adult attending Pace University in New York City that he was exposed to queer culture, and he was able to “actively, fully be myself” as a gay man. And it wasn’t until he saw Viola Davis’s badass bisexual Annalise Keating on ABC’s acclaimed How to Get Away With Murder that he felt like he saw something of himself represented on television.
Like Silva, Rubinstein, who spent his childhood in the U.S. but was born in Israel after his family left the Soviet Union following its collapse, had a similar experience growing up in a culture that taught folks being gay or queer was verboten. “It just
