It will be one of the series with which HBO Max begins its journey in Spain this Tuesday. Created, written and directed by Abril Zamora, ‘Todo lo otro’ is the story of Dafne and her friends, a group of thirty-somethings in the midst of an existential crisis. Dafne’s reaches its peak when one day, fart, she tells her best friend that she is in love with him. Thus begins a fiction that moves between drama and comedy in search of truth.
-‘Todo lo otro ‘is one of the series with which HBO Max opens its doors in Spain. Is it an added responsibility? Do you feel more pressure?
-Not really, because they have always made me understand that they liked the project and believed in it. And that has given me a lot of peace of mind because I have not been thinking about whether people are going to like it, if not. They have trusted me and given me a lot of freedom to tell the story however I want. I was very proud to be among those first series and I am very grateful, but there is no added pressure, just the pressure of doing a series for HBO Max, which is enough.
-The series follows in the footsteps of a group of thirty-somethings in the midst of an existential crisis. Is there no thirty-something without existential crisis?
-Of course, I like to talk about existential crises because I have been in crisis since I was fourteen years old. I have a crisis all the time. I think it’s a normal state because we are nonconformist people, so no matter how good you are, you will always want to be in a different place and you will always feel a bit frustrated by love, sex, your friendships or whatever. It all starts with the fact that I wanted to tell a story with a particular tone or that was naturalistic, but a bit dramatic, a bit light, especially since I don’t think much is done here and outside there are many series that allow themselves to pause . Here we are very afraid of that, everything has to be information and fast. And, rather than telling a thirty-something story, I wanted to explore that. As I wanted to work with my friends and they are all about the same age, it was inevitable that it would be a thirty-something story, although from my point of view it is not a generational story.
-The starting point is when Dafne, your character, tells his best friend that she is in love with him and then much of the series works as the narrative until that day. Why did you choose to tell it like this?
-It is the main conflict of the character and before I knew where it was going I wanted to explore how the characters got there and present them in a piano way to see how she realizes that she has fallen in love. It was important not to do a standard dramaturgy with a beginning, a conflict and a development, but I put the conflict on you, then I go back and get to where we had started, which is chapter six, where what happens next is resumed.
-Alberto Casado, from Pantomima Full, does the voice-over, a kind of omniscient narrator who knows what all the characters think and plays to laugh a little at them. Weren’t you afraid that, being such a well-known voice, it would distract a bit from what was happening on the screen?
-I do not know. I love him and I was very excited and I did a test only for him. He beat me from minute one when he started reading the text. For me, the voice-over is like the voice we all have that tortures us all the time by saying “you’re ugly, you’re a scammer, you’re a loser, no one will ever love you!” I tell myself constantly. As the characters are very manipulative and only show what they want, it was interesting to have a voice that told us what they were really thinking and that associated it with comedy and enhanced it a lot. He has a normal type voice and ends up being almost one more spectator who says what he thinks about the characters. In addition, my character is almost that of a teenager, a princess, and with her voice it almost seems that everything has a fairy tale halo.
-However, the series is not cut with anything. There are several sex scenes and, above all, a much more real and naturalized drug treatment than in 90% of Spanish series. Why do you think it is still a taboo subject?
-If everyone is on drugs or everyone has been drugged at some point, at least the people around me. It seems to me the most normal thing in the world and to look the other way is to hide a reality and I think it is very cool that morally the characters do things that we have been forbidden and that can be negative for the protagonists. My character hooks up with a guy she just met, sucks his cock, swallows his semen and nothing happens; and he takes M at a party on the weekdays because he feels like it and there is no consequence in plan he took drugs and had an accident. The drug you have to know when to use it and at what time and it is like everything, if you abuse it, you have risks, such as drinking or doing excessive sports. Like people talk about frustration or anxiety, I think we can’t look the other way with drugs. And the same with the sex scenes, we have tried to make them as real as possible: they cum on you and you don’t cover your boobs running, it doesn’t make any sense.
-How much April is there in Dafne? It gives the feeling that a lot.
-There is a lot of me and it has given me a lot of modesty in many moments. I always do directing work with the actors that has to do with the way of talking with the way of moving and then the character is built only based on his actions, which define him much more. And in that sense, it cost her and I to separate because we react the same, we talk the same, we laugh the same, we move the same and we are the same heavy. But it is true that there was a moment when I noticed that we were separating due to our different reactions and that gave me a lot of peace because I began to feel very exposed as a person within the series. We are just as pathetic, clumsy, we laugh a lot at ourselves, we are very excited when it comes to love and we are luminous characters even having a lot of pessimism in our backpack, but we are completely different for some things.
Abril Zamora, as Dafne, in a still from ‘Todo lo otro’. /
-And what about Dafne’s fears about her transition? The insecurities, the fear of not being accepted among friends, of not finding love. Did you also experience them?
-I had them, but in a different way. When I started getting into dating apps, I always thought it would take a lot for me to be a trans girl but when I started hanging out I realized that I was very successful with guys who were interested in me, plus beyond a fetish or something sexual. I dated many and never had a conflict and they did not have it and many continued to stay with me. She is doing worse than me in that regard, but although for me transsexuality is not important in the series and it is not given much importance, I think it was important to point out that reality. It is not my reality because I have had a different luck as in other aspects: I am a trans creator and director and it is not a very normal tonic. From chapter two on, very little is said about transsexuality because it is not relevant to either the plot or the character.
-Do you think that showing these realities can help people who are going through something similar?
-I think that what will help trans people the most is to show a reality far from transsexuality, that it is not given any importance, that it is a girl and that its conflict is that it is in love with its friend or that it has a job He does not like. That much more normalizes that she is a transsexual pamphleteer or that her plot focuses on transsexuality. I think that what helps the parents of a girl who is trans is to see references of people who are happy and who are doing well in life and that not everything has to be a tortuous path because for me in many moments it has been and not in many others. But we can’t look the other way either. There is a lot of transphobia, every day we wake up with brutal aggressions and that unfortunately is overshadowing that it is also seen that there are small hopes.
-He was talking about transphobia and hatred that has grown towards the LGTBI community. Where do you think it comes from and what can be done?
-All this arises from the fact that there is a rise of the extreme right and all the people who were in the cave suddenly come out to link to that story. They have felt that it was wrong to think like this before and little by little they have been supported. I don’t know why it bothers people so much that people live their own lives if it doesn’t affect anyone. I cannot have a debate with someone who is against who I am as a human. When their opinion attacks you directly, I believe that it should not be given a voice because it also violates human rights and that should not fit anywhere because it is not an opinion, it is an attack. I try to help as much as I can trying to make an inclusive fiction, because television is education, and seeing a character who is normalized in his circumstance makes people who are unaware of that circumstance begin to normalize him. Seeing LGBT characters on TV normalizes for someone who does not have such a close person.
-Being such a personal story, what weaknesses and strengths have you seen yourself directing, writing and acting?
-Fortalezas I never see myself because I am my worst enemy, I boycott myself all the time, I always think that I am a fake, just like you and the rest of the world (laughs). I have learned a lot as a filmmaker because I have done my homework very well and at night it was always to plan the next day and the first thing I did when I got to the set was to talk to the cinematographer and tell him how the shoot was going to be. I have also really enjoyed it. I was lucky to be able to rehearse a lot with the actors before and that work was already done. They are also my friends in real life playing my friends in the series, so the relationships were already very worked and it has been very easy. And as an actress I have felt very fragile in many moments because I have felt very exposed and I have had to go through things that are not very positive. I am proud to have crossed the barriers that I had. I had never done a sex scene as a woman and I have done it and I am happy. But love scenes, which I have also done, almost make me more embarrassed than showing the body. And I have directed with my combo completely naked with my team because it was what I had to do at that time because of the honesty pact that we have made with this project to make it true.
-He has said on occasion that acting like April is being almost like starting from scratch. Have you missed Abel?
– (laughs). No, because the result that I gave before was not very cool. I was always acting on something already acted and before I was only aware of what I was projecting in front of others, I was only waiting to project an image of myself that was not true. When I removed all those layers, it was just a simple “this is happening to me as a character and that’s it.” I have never been aware of whether I have to sit like this, if I have to put my hand in my pocket, if I have to look like a more masculine person than I am. Since I started my career as an actress, I have shed many things that were weapons and tricks, but that did not give the result that I wanted and did not make me happy. It was a start from scratch, but from the game that is what acting is, like a girl in front of everything. I was lucky that in ‘Vis a vis’ I had very little text at the beginning, little by little they gave me more and I learned a lot. And I’ve done a lot of things here that I would never have done if I hadn’t written the series. Nobody would have given me this wonderful opportunity to go through so many things.
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