(Photo by Rachel Sadon)

“A hug from Rogelio is like a rabbit’s foot: lucky, rare and soft to the touch,” Rogelio De La Vega announces in season one of Jane the Virgin. An embrace from his portrayer, Jaime Camil, is certainly lucky and soft to the touch, but not quite so rare.

I know this because I found myself standing in the greenery-filled atrium of the Organization of American States headquarters last week, with rays of sunshine beaming down, as though orchestrated by a telenovela director, as Camil greeted me with a warm hug.

“We hug and we kiss!” the Mexican actor says, by way of explanation, shortly before he was honored at GALA Theatre’s Noche de Estrellas. Later, as he stood by my side for a photo, grinning with the same megawatt smile that Rogelio flashes liberally on Jane, Camil pulled me in for another embrace, as though we were old friends. He smells wonderful. I briefly consider if this is a dream sequence.

Anyway, as Jane’s father, Camil plays an actor who only learns he has an adult daughter after she is accidentally artificially inseminated during a routine gynecologist visit. The show, which just wrapped its third season, follows Jane’s mishaps in love and family as she navigates being a pregnant virgin while being thrown a steady stream of plot twists that range from the heart-achingly true-to-life (the death of a loved one) to the spectacularly outlandish (having her baby stolen by a face-changing international criminal who killed her baby’s grandfather before dating his daughter). In between, it has featured some of the most nuanced, relevant storylines about abortion and immigration on television.

Gina Rodriquez is officially the star, and the voiceover actor Anthony Mendez (who plays the omniscient narrator) has won well-deserved praise, but Camil steals every scene he’s in.

Rogelio is a vain narcissist with a tremendous heart, a man who responds to a crying woman who says she looks like a wreck by handing her a tube of concealer with such utter sincerity that one forgets to be offended. Even on the rare episode that the show drags (please, beloved writers, no more playground election metaphors), his outlandish charm never wears off.

“They write brilliant stuff for Rogelio, and they make him very balanced. For some reason, when he says ‘I want my daughter to have the pleasure of knowing me,’ you don’t want to slap him for being a pretentious prick. You feel like hugging him,” Camil says. “I think that’s the perfect balance that Jennie [Snyder Urman, the creator and showrunner] and her amazing team of writers create with the character. He’s very vain and very superficial, but at the same time he’s very endearing and full of heart.”

Camil may deflect credit to the writers, but it is clear that the warmth and humor that he imbues the character with is genuine (“Rogelio does not pop in peach. I pop in every single color,” he tells me at one point, with a Rogelio-esque flourish).

His sense of comedic timing is no accident.

As with so much else on the show, a loving riff on the telenovela genre, Camil’s presence is a huge wink for a portion of its audience. Just as Rogelio is a successful telenovela star, Camil is a bona fide superstar in Latin America, best known for his starring role on the Mexican comedy (La Fea Mas Bella) that shares its source inspiration with Ugly Betty.

And just as Rogelio makes a conscious effort to break into the U.S. market, so, too, did Camil—albeit with a much easier transition (let’s just say that Rogelio’s involved competition with Rob Lowe). Camil was offered several projects, ultimately choosing Jane the Virgin based on a script that he describes as “full of life, very creative, very fast paced.”

Equally importantly, the show also embraces the culture of its characters without veering into caricature. There’s more spoken Spanish than anywhere else on prime-time TV, but it is neither gratuitous or cliche.

“Because we are Latinos, it doesn’t mean we have to shout ‘pinatas’ or ‘fiesta’ or ‘tacos’ in every single line,” Camil says. “It’s important to portray Latinos as normal, middle class Americans because that’s what we are.”

It is a mission close to the heart of GALA Theatre, which awarded Camil its Award for Artistic Excellence and Inspiration last week and recently staged the Spanish-language premiere of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In The Heights.

Jane the Virgin has always been a joyful portrayal of Latina life, but it’s taken on additional meaning in a time when the country elected a man who tweeted “The best taco bowls are made in Trump Tower Grill. I love Hispanics!”

Without straying from its roots as a family-driven comedy, the show has responded with a mixture of plucky trolling and serious storylines.

“We are living in very surreal and interesting political times right now, and I think our showrunner is very brave and intelligent to touch these subjects. Lighthearted—but she touches the subjects, like you would talk about over coffee with some friends,” Camil says. “[The CW is] a very progressive network. I really respect Mark Pedowitz, our president, and of course the writers and the showrunner and our producer for being so brave and always keeping Jane relevant and on the edge. It’s a show that we’re into season three now, and it keeps surprising you.”