“Everyone believes in what they believe,” he says in the first episode of The Messiah the character played by Cecilia Roth (Buenos Aires, 1956). The Javis series is the most recent role of an actress whose career is not an act of faith, but a faith of life. “If I don’t act, I die,” Roth has said, which she has been interpreting for as long as she can remember. Having grown up in a liberal home, the result of the convictions of her parents, the journalist Abrasha Rotenberg and the singer, pianist and composer Dina Rot, and in the company of her brother Ariel Rot, four years younger, fueled her artistic ambitions, which took her to debut in the cinema in 1976, the same year in which his family went into exile to Spain. Today, more than 40 years later, he still has a lot of that young woman without fear of anything.
Your character is that of a woman who believes in UFOs after having been contacted and wants to contact them again. What is her relationship with faith?
I wish I had. I very much envy people who have faith. Sometimes I do have faith in things that are going to happen, I am intuitive. But not in anything religious, religions are absolutely political decisions of men. A man with a beard up there? I don’t believe it, I wish I believed it. I wish I had believed in the Three Wise Men.
You arrived in Madrid after the coup d’état in Argentina. His brother sings in The waltz of memories whose first two verses are: “We fell into a hotel on Gran Vía / Poor little sister, she cried all night while I slept.” It’s true?
[Se emociona] It was the feeling of having ended a cycle forever. And the one that came was better, huh? If we had stayed, something could have happened to us. But feeling that at 19 years old is strong. My father was not there, he stayed there for a while closing some things, but we came with my mother and we went to live in some aparthotels near Plaza de Castilla, where many exiled Argentines lived, actors, singers, musicians… I had a very good time. Distraught for the first three months, I didn’t want to leave the house, until my mother told me: that’s enough, let’s go find a theater school or something where you can make friends. Then, through an advertisement in EL PAÍS, we found Hugo Urquijo, Argentine theater director. And in his classes I started to meet people, my first Spanish boyfriend among them. I was extremely lucky.
And how did you meet Pedro Almodóvar?
I have a confusion about it, but it was in 1976 or 77. The confusion is if it was in San Sebastián or if… I think it was because my great friend Gustavo Pérez de Ayala, who died a few years ago, told me about some dinners that They were organized every Saturday between people who did not know each other, but with friends in common. So I went to one and met Pedro. Gustavo had told me about him, he had told me that he was a film director who showed his films in bars and that he was great. And things happened that way, very naturally. I was lucky to have been in the right place at the right time.
Has the title of “muse of the Movida” weighed on you?
La Movida is an expression invented by the press. What I do feel is that it wasn’t me, it was a very large group. The Movida, if you want to call it that, was not only joy and peace, it had tremendous consequences, because there was absolute unconsciousness. Nobody knew that heroin killed you, there was no information, and we were all very curious boys and girls. I have the feeling that I haven’t slept much those years (laughs). We were doing things all the time. I also did interviews for Diario 16. To Alaska, to Imanol Arias, to Victoria Abril… I loved it.
There have been many comparisons between Almodóvar and the Javis, do you think they have anything in common?
They have in common that they have modified the rules of the game and are very attractive to many people. Pedro had more difficulty at the time, it must be said, because he was another Spain.
How did you become part of The Messiah?
I had seen things about the Javis, but I never thought we would meet. It’s funny how it was. Last August I went to renew my DNI and when I was doing the process Antonio Rubial, my agent, called me and told me that the Javis want to meet me. Suddenly the commissioner says to me: “Are you from show business? Because my son is from show business.” And I ask him who his son is and he tells me Javi Calvo. He leaves, after a while he comes back and says to me: “My son says you have an appointment with him on Tuesday at seven.”
Right now in Spain the era of the Transition is being greatly demystified. What is your opinion of those years?
We were surrounded by strange characters, although not as strange as Videla, of course. The first time I voted in my life was in Spain and of course, I voted for Felipe. People who did not experience that may have a feeling of poverty, of lies, of scams. But I have respect for those years.
Many characters from then have become very conservative…
And what nonsense because they tell you as a child: “As a young person you are a communist and as an adult, if you are red, you are a fool.” Well no. He doesn’t have to. It amazes me how many people have very conservative thinking, very different from what they had 10 years ago, not much more, eh? What do you learn differently in 10 years? I still have the same criticisms that I had, that I have and had against the left, and the panic on the right I also had and still have. I mean, that didn’t change.
How could something like Javier Milei happen? [candidato ultraderechista a la presidencia de Argentina]?
Because politicians are politicians and there is a moment when they stop thinking about people. And since Peronism, there was a stop in creativity. The same thing kept repeating. The other day Axel Kicillof, the governor of the province of Buenos Aires, who seems to me to be very capable and very honest, said something that he did not like very much: “Stop singing what we all know.” Let’s sing one that we have to invent. The lack of creativity on the left is notable. In Argentina people vote from the age of 16 and many kids who have not experienced 2001, have not experienced the dictatorship, have not experienced Néstor and Cristina, have not experienced Alfonsín… find it something very attractive.
“Time is an ally if you realize that it is passing. If you resist, it is an enemy.” Has it been difficult for you to have time as an ally?
I don’t know if it took me a long time, but it took me a lot of paddling. A lot of effort to realize that if I resisted, I was a real enemy. And now I’m very relieved, because I really think it’s a useless resistance. She’s lost.
When she met Fito, he said to her: “Can you bring me a glass of wine, baby?” And you said to yourself: “Oh, I fell in love.” Now do you prefer that the glass of wine be brought to you?
I was already going to look for one for myself. The word babe is very rock and I think that excited me. Hearing her say it to me was like there was a certain intimacy. I had seen it a couple of times and it had always caught my attention. I hadn’t fallen in love with him, but I liked what he said. He had not listened to him much as a musician, but the day I heard two of his songs, which were Tombs of glory and Believe, I hallucinated. And yes, that day I knew that I had fallen in love with her.
They are friends now, how did he get it?
Both of them working hard. It wasn’t easy either. And the years passed. Now we have a very beautiful relationship. We have a son that we both love. He was the one who encouraged Fito to do merchandising for him. He convinced him by telling him that the Rolling Stones earned more on merchandising than on their shows.
In 2018, you recounted the rape you suffered in Madrid, at the hands of a journalist who was your friend. Did it help you personally to make it public?
It helped me realize that that was rape, to finish internalizing it. In other words, a partner can also rape you. You say you don’t want to and they immediately call you surly or asexual. There is still a lot of machismo, a lot. But there is also a very sisterly way of thinking about women as a group.
Do you remember any specific episode in your love life or your coexistence with stars who surrounded you that, seen today, seems intolerable?
Many. And I felt totally incapable of saying anything out of a need for them to not stop loving me. With boyfriends, with directors… That you allow yourself to be mistreated or mistreated… it is also a very strong form of psychological violence, you do not exist, you are a ghost. Now I’m not that in any way.
And how did you make the change?
I believe that we all did it together and that shows that collective action is possible. We all realized it and we started saying things like “damn, having your husband fuck you, even if you don’t want to fuck, it’s not right.” That no is no. And that applied to everything.
You have been psychoanalyzing since you were 17, what have you learned?
Not to shut up. I was very afraid to speak in private. There have been many moments in which I have remained silent, so as not to hurt and perhaps not to separate. Because there is some submission there to the mandate to have a partner and have children because that is what it means to be a woman.
And you have completely freed yourself from that?
I am living alone for the first time in my life and I have a happiness that I have never had before. Cohabitation erodes a relationship. Why do we have to live together? We can love each other equally and more surely by giving each other surprises.
#Cecilia #Roth #living #time #life #happiness