Marcelo Hernández admits he never uses pickup lines and the dating approach he swears by is refreshingly simple
In a rapid-fire interview, the actor gave away his actual strategy for meeting women, and the part about his mother’s advice is the line that landed hardest.
Marcelo Hernández, who plays the loveable Domingo on Acapulco, the hit Apple TV+ comedy, sat down recently for a rapid-fire interview that covered everything from how cuddly he is to his thoughts on intimacy as a Latino man. Most of those answers were funny, and one of them was genuinely worth writing down.
The interview with Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen moved quickly through lighthearted territory until the interviewer asked him for his go-to pickup line. Hernández paused, then said he does not use them. He thinks the whole approach misses the point, so he asks questions and actually pays attention to the answers. “The more you know about her, the more you will see,” he told the interviewer, who immediately told him to stop talking because it was landing too well.
From there, the conversation turned to what physical quality he notices first on a woman. His answer was the smile, and the reasoning he gave was specific: “If I have not made her smile, then I think I’m in trouble.” He tracks whether the connection is actually working rather than focusing on his own performance, which is a different starting point than most men use when they walk into a conversation.
When the interviewer asked about the best dating advice his mother ever gave him, he did not hesitate. “Be honest with the woman,” he said, and moved on like it was the most obvious thing in the world.
All three answers point in the same direction: show up as yourself, get genuinely curious about who she is, and pay attention to how the conversation is landing instead of how you are coming across.
Why his dating advice works
The pickup line industry runs on the idea that attraction is something you can engineer through the right opener, the right timing, the right sequence of moves. Hernández’s approach is the opposite of all of these, and its logic is straightforward.
When you walk into a conversation genuinely curious about the other person, the dynamic changes. You stop performing and start paying attention, and people feel that shift even when they cannot name it. Most men on a first date are thinking about how they are coming across. Someone who is actually interested in who you are and what you think stands out immediately, and that contrast does more work than any scripted opener ever could.
The smile detail is a practical example of this. Hernández said he notices it first because if he has not made her smile, he knows he is in trouble. He is tracking her response rather than his own delivery, which means he is measuring the real thing: whether the connection is there, not whether his line landed. That is a more honest way to read a conversation, and it keeps you present instead of running a checklist in your head.
His mother’s advice does the same thing from a different angle. “Be honest with the woman” sounds almost too simple to be actionable, but it cuts out an enormous amount of behavior that tends to go wrong in early dating: presenting a version of yourself you cannot maintain, saying what you think she wants to hear, or running a polished routine that has nothing to do with who you actually are. Honesty narrows the gap between the person showing up and the person you are going home with, and that gap is usually where things start to fall apart.
The men who tend to be genuinely good at meeting people are rarely the ones with the sharpest lines. They are the ones who make the other person feel like the most interesting person in the room, and that comes from paying attention, asking real questions, and being willing to show up as themselves. Hernández learned that from his mother, and he clearly never felt the need to look further than that.
