How Mexican beauty Kate del Castillo found herself at heart of real-life drug cartel drama

Mexican actress Kate del Castillo has stepped out of the fictional drug trafficker roles she played on TV and finds herself involved in the real world of drug capos.

The glamorous 43-year-old Del Castillo had her most memorable role in 2011 playing a drug kingpin in The Queen of the South, a TV series based on a book written by Spanish writer Arturo Perez-Reverte.

“It was every actress's dream,” said the famed beauty of the role in an interview with the Televisa network the following year. “She is a character who sleeps with married men, smokes marijuana, traffics drugs, kills people, she swears a lot and she is a big drunk.” She also played a mobster in the US television series “Weeds.”

Now Del Castillo is credited by US actor Sean Penn with setting up a secret meeting with the world's most wanted drug boss, Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, in the mountains of Mexico while he was on the run in October, three months before he was captured Friday.

Del Castillo has long been fascinated with “El Chapo,” to whom she wrote a public appeal in 2012, urging him to do good and saying, “Today I believe more in Chapo Guzman than in the governments that hide the truth from me.” Del Castillo later told The Associated Press that “nobody understood the irony, the sarcasm and the joke I was making” in the letter that was posted to her Twitter account.

But many saw it as fitting in with her on- and off-screen persona.