Manuel García-Rulfo moved to Los Angeles 15 years ago, and now the Guadalajara-born actor says he feels more like an Angeleno than a transplant. “I love this city. It’s cool. It has so much to offer,” he says with a charming smile.

In Sunday Funday, L.A. people give us a play-by-play of their ideal Sunday around town. Find ideas and inspiration on where to go, what to eat and how to enjoy life on the weekends.

It’s fitting then that he’s in the most quintessential of L.A. shows. García-Rulfo is readying his fourth season as defense attorney Mickey Haller in Netflix’s “The Lincoln Lawyer,” a series that features motifs of gentrification, city hall corruption and courtroom intrigue — all L.A. specialties. And Haller navigates it all from the most L.A. of offices: his Lincoln Navigator (and sometimes a classic 1965 Lincoln Convertible).

Relaxing in a Last Bookstore T-shirt, García-Rulfo, a literary obsessive, speaks about another of his recent projects: helping bring to life “Pedro Páramo,” Netflix’s adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s 1955 magical realist novel, a story close to his heart as he’s a distant relative of the famed author. “I think it’s the most iconic piece of literature from Mexico,” he says about the book, which served as an influence to Nobel-prize winning author Gabriel García-Márquez.

Looking ahead, García-Rulfo is set to make an appearance in next year’s highly anticipated reboot, “Jurassic World Rebirth,” further expanding his already diverse career. With roles that reflect the city’s diversity and complexity, García-Rulfo is not just part of Hollywood — he’s making Los Angeles his own. Here’s how he’d spend the perfect day in L.A.

7:30 a.m.: Burritos with friends, oats alone

If I go out with friends on a Saturday night, then I sleep in Sunday morning. But later than 9 a.m. is already too late for me. If I don’t go out, I’m up at like 7:30 or 8 a.m. Breakfast is not a routine. If I’m with friends, we go have breakfast. If I stay home, I like overnight oats. Or a smoothie. A lot of people who come from Mexico, they’re like, “What places do you recommend?” I am terrible with names. I know where it is, but I never remember the name. There’s this breakfast burrito place that’s in Los Feliz.

9 a.m.: Hit some tennis balls

I usually play either tennis in the morning or in the afternoon when the sun is coming down. I started playing as a kid, and then I stopped. When I came here to L.A. 15 years ago, I started playing again. Tennis is very mental. You have to be really in the moment. So it’s kind of like a meditation — not a meditation, but it’s one of those things that you can do for hours and time just stops. And California is amazing for it — the weather all year round is perfect.

I’ve been playing at Plummer Park in West Hollywood. It’s a community. You go there and there’s going to be people that you know. You wait for a game to finish and then you jump in. It used to be very easy to get a court. You’d just get there, and you waited for half an hour maximum. But now the courts are converted for pickleball, so we only have two or three courts for tennis. Now, it’s harder.

11 a.m.: Zuma Beach and sushi burritos

If the day is really good, I like to go to Zuma Beach. There’s a restaurant near there called Howdy’s Sonrisa Cafe that has sushi burritos. It’s in a little plaza, so we get that and then go back to Zuma for the rest of the day. The sushi burritos are so good, man; you just grab it and then you can eat at the beach.

3 p.m.: Recite legal jargon

When I’m shooting “The Lincoln Lawyer,” which is like five months a year, I’m exhausted. We’re shooting every day. Sometimes we work Friday night and we finish Saturday, so Sunday, I have to study. I go play tennis to detach and just breathe, and then come back home and just keep studying. I have to read scripts and learn lines. [Because it’s a courtroom show], there are a lot of monologues and legal terms. So usually, on the weekends, I kind of study. And I’ll just pray to the gods of the arts to enlighten me.

5 p.m.: Books, books, books

I love books, so I go a lot to the Last Bookstore. I could spend the whole day there, when I’m downtown. There’s one in West Hollywood called Book Soup. I had an experience there the other day. I went in to buy a book, and this guy comes in with a motorcycle helmet on, and he takes it off and he goes like this [shakes his head in slow motion] and his hair is all messy. It’s Keanu Reeves. Time just froze for me. And he goes to buy some books.

Lately I’ve been reading a lot of history. I was in England [shooting “Jurassic World Rebirth”], so I am obsessed with their history. I started reading a lot of Roman history. I was obsessed with [Charles] Bukowski, I was obsessed with [Haruki] Murakami and now I’m in this period that I’m obsessed with history. Right now, I’m reading “The Iron King” [by Maurice Druon], which is so good. It’s from where George R.R. Martin got the inspiration for “A Game of Thrones,” but it’s based on reality.

7 p.m.: Catch a movie

It’s a bummer, because the ArcLight in Hollywood was my church. Now I have to drive some. But, yeah, most Sundays, I try to go to the movies. If I’m shooting “The Lincoln Lawyer,” I won’t go out. Maybe I’ll just watch a soccer game or a movie at home. My team sucks — they’re called Atlas from Guadalajara. In the Premier League, I guess Chelsea is my team.

I haven’t been to the movies in a minute because I just wrapped “Jurassic [World]” a week ago, and I was in Thailand and Malta. Actually, I saw a movie in Malta — we all went together. We saw “Deadpool & Wolverine.” I’m going tonight to see “Megalopolis.” And I want to see “The Substance” with Demi Moore and Sean Baker’s “Anora.”

10 p.m.: Play some tunes before bed

I play guitar sometimes, and if I’m in the mood, I’ll grab my guitar and play. And then I usually go to bed around 10:30 or 11 p.m.

While researching for his new Netflix comedy series, A Man on the Inside, TV producer Michael Schur visited a string of retirement communities throughout California. He expected them to be sad places, but what he found surprised him.

These were “flourishing communities of people who were very happy to be with each other and to be part of a community,” Schur says. “They were places of happiness and joy, largely.”

A Man on the Inside centers on a widowed retiree, played by Ted Danson, who goes undercover to solve a crime in a retirement community. The series was inspired by the 2020 Chilean documentary called The Mole Agent.

“What was remarkable to me about the documentary, among other things, is that everyone I know who saw it had the same exact feeling, which was ‘I should call my mom,’ or ‘I need to call my grandpa,’ or ‘I should hang out with my kids more,’” Schur says. “And it’s a rare piece of art, I think, that can cause everyone to have such a warm and positive feeling. So my longtime producing partner Morgan Sackett said, ‘We should remake that and have Ted [Danson] play the main part,’ and as soon as he said it, I just knew he was right and that there was a very good, slightly fictionalized show that could hopefully give people that same feeling.”

Schur’s previous TV credits include writing for The Office, co-creating and writing for Parks and Recreation and Brooklyn Nine-Nine in addition to creating and writing for The Good Place. With all those hits, it’s clear that Schur could retire himself, but he says he enjoys what he does too much to stop.
 
“Why wouldn’t I work? It’s sitting in a room with a dozen really funny people writing stories and making jokes,” he says. “I can’t believe I get to do this. It’s a miracle. It’s incredible. And I do it because I love it.”
 

Interview highlights

On how comedy helped him be less of a rule-follower

I have a very specific memory of being in kindergarten and being on the playground … and the teacher came out and went like, “OK, everybody line up.” And I immediately walked over and stood right in front of her. And the other kids were like still milling around and goofing around and laughing and playing with foursquare balls and stuff. And I remember thinking, like, What are they doing? This is insane. Like the teacher just said, line up and they’re not lining up. …

My first job was at Saturday Night Live. Saturday Night Live is a big, messy swirl of craziness. Like it’s a big rambling, 90-minute-long live variety show where part of the fun is that people are making mistakes and coloring outside the lines. … That was actually really good for me to be in a place at the beginning of my career where it was like, this is not rigid. This world is not about following rules so much.

On getting the idea for The Good Place, which explores moral philosophy

I used to play this game as I drove around in traffic in L.A. where someone would cut me off on the freeway or we would be in traffic and someone would pull onto the shoulder and speed past me and cut the line, and as a way of trying to stem off what you would call road rage, I would play a game in my head where I would say, “That guy just lost 10 points.” I was imagining a scenario in which there was some kind of omniscient observer of human behavior. And I satisfied my own anger or displeasure with other people by imagining that that cost them in some cosmic way.

And so after Parks and Recreation ended and Brooklyn Nine-Nine was up and running … NBC very kindly said, you can sort of do whatever you want and we’ll give you at least one season on the air. So I had been thinking about that game I played in my head, about other people and about myself and judging my own behavior and doing things that I knew were maybe slightly iffy and how many points I lost or how many points I gained when I did certain things. And so that became the idea that I just liked the most of the ideas that I had. And I just pursued that and thought, alright, it’s going to be weird. I’m going to do a half-hour comedy show about moral philosophy. But I don’t know, maybe it’ll work. I just sort of rolled the dice and I’m glad I did because the experience of working on it was wonderful.

On developing the concept for Parks and Recreation

I grew up in a pretty sleepy suburban town in the Northeast. And like, the government was great. I loved the government. Like the government was what filled the swimming pool and the public park that I swam in and organized the Little League. And, you know, my public school was great and my teachers were great. And I grew up kind of not understanding this weird demonization of the government. … I’m older now, and I understand that the government has a lot of problems, but I just never understood why it was like this demonized force in America. And so I kind of thought like … in the same way that [The Office‘s] Dunder Mifflin was a fictional private sector company, we could essentially create an entirely fictional town and talk about it through the world of the public sector and just show what I have always believed, which is like the government is just a bunch of people in an office who try to do stuff to that will make the town better.

On Parks and Recreation reflecting the Obama years

I think that that show is very much of a time and place. There are people who use revisionist history to claim that it was always hopelessly naïve or something. But that is what the mood of the country at the time we were making that show … It wasn’t wide-eyed optimism, it was careful optimism. Like Leslie Knope was extremely optimistic about the possibility of making people’s lives better. But she was also constantly confronted with the impossibility of that because people are grouchy. They didn’t want her to do whatever she was doing. They were throwing obstacles in her way. … We weren’t pretending that everything was rosy and great. What we were trying to say was, it’s a better way to go through life, to be hopeful and optimistic than it is to be pessimistic.

On making fun of NPR on Parks and Recreation

There were a number of times that Leslie went on the local NPR station over the years, and it was just our chance to, like, make the little jokes about the reality of listening to NPR. … But it was always fun to do NPR jokes. It was always a favorite exercise. We had to kind of stop ourselves from having her go on too much, because if we could have done it in every episode and had plenty to make fun of — lovingly.

On how the shift from network to streaming has changed TV writing

The biggest change, obviously, is just the shift to the streaming model. You know, The Office, we did 28 episodes one year, I think, or maybe 30. The typical season was 22 episodes or 24 episodes. And now a season of TV is eight half hours usually, or maybe 10. And that just completely changes the way you tell stories, right? The advantage TV always had over movies was you could, in success, watch a set of characters live and change and grow over many, many, many years.

Like, people still watch Friends because … you’re watching people go from their mid-20s to their mid-30s and they have relationships and those relationships get tangled and complicated and end. … During COVID people revisited old shows that had 200 episodes like Friends and Cheers and whatever. And you could sit during COVID and watch an episode every night for five or six months. And that was incredibly valuable and I think brought people a lot of comfort. And that’s what we’re losing. And that’s what I mourn the most about the new system is we’re just sort of losing what, to my mind, was the inherent advantage that TV storytelling had over movies or anything else.

Lauren Krenzel and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Beth Novey adapted it for the web.