Following his run on “Hemlock Grove,” de la Fuente popped up briefly in a number of TV series. Between 2015 and 2019, he starred in a Season 6 episode of “Blue Bloods” titled “Flags of our Fathers,” an episode of CBS’ “Limitless” titled “A Dog’s Breakfast,” an episode of NBC’s “Game of Silence,” and a Season 1 episode of “Bull” called “How to Dodge a Bullet” (via IMDb). It was the actor’s three-episode arc on creator Barbara Hall’s “Madam Secretary,” however, that most defined the era for the former “SVU” star.
In 2017, de la Fuente made his debut on the series portraying the president of The Philippines, Datu Andrada. In Season 3’s “A Break in Diplomacy,” negotiations between Andrada and Téa Leoni’s titular Secretary of State, Elizabeth McCord, go south when the president makes an aggressive sexual advance on McCord and she punches him in the face. Though Andrada’s own military seek the United States’ support in assassinating their new president, McCord decides to look for an alternative (read: less bloody) means of gaining the upper hand.
McCord soon discovers that Andrada has paid a number of women for their silence over the years, and although — in the world of television, at least — that alone would be enough to bring Andrada down, the leverage McCord ultimately gains over the president is of a different nature entirely. In the end, the U.S. learns that Andrada has been taking millions of dollars in bribes from China, a career-destroying fact McCord threatens to reveal if Andrada refuses to fall in line. De la Fuente reprised his role as the corrupt leader in two more episodes, and it’s easy to see shades of Andrada in the major recurring television role he held simultaneously.