Directors Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo were meeting with television executives in their native Spain when they were asked to name someone they’d love to make a biographical series about.

“They probably expected us to say someone like Julio Iglesias, but one of us said, ‘La Veneno,’” Calvo tells Variety during a Zoom interview from the couple’s home in Madrid. “It was like a revelation. One man was looking down at his papers and looked up and was like, ‘What did you say? Who?’ And I was just like, ‘She was a transgender woman. She was famous, but she was a prostitute. And then she went to jail.’ We started to develop this TV show in our heads.”

Cristina “La Veneno” Ortiz was a pop culture superstar in Spain in the 1990s. She was discovered working the streets and became a sensation after her appearance on the late-night...