Eleanor Watling | Actress
Interview
The actress premieres the second and final season of ‘Nasdrovia’ on Movistar Plus+, more bitter and dark than its predecessor
Things are not going very well for Edurne and Julián, the businessmen who opened a Russian food restaurant in ‘Nasdrovia’. It is not for less. Boris, the boss of the Russian mafia who ended up making the dining room his home, forced them at the end of last season – beware, ‘spoiler’ – to murder a Ukrainian fishmonger with a thirst for revenge. From that point begins the second season of fiction, which arrives at Movistar Plus + this Friday. More bitter and cynical, the fiction places the pair of ex-lawyers at the service of an increasingly terrifying Boris. Leonor Watling (Madrid, 46 years old) once again gets into the skin of an Edurne plunged into depression.
-How appropriate that the premiere of the second season of ‘Nasdrovia’ arrives with the geopolitical panorama as it is.
– What a time, huh?
-She’s very worried?
-Well, it depends on the day. There are days that I don’t even remember, there are days when I’m very involved in current affairs and I say to myself: “Wait, maybe the Third World War is starting and we’re here haha haha.” And then comes climate change and it’s like a bottomless pit, so let’s talk about other things (laughs).
-It is a bitter second season. Is this rupture of genres an example of the maturity that television fiction is reaching in our country?
– Generalize so much. I think it’s the maturity of the writers and the creator, Marc Vigil, the other I don’t know anymore. I loved it, but in the seed of the project there was already that anchor in reality, even with these bizarre situations. Marc, as a director, was very clear that his feet had to be on the right foot in reality, so it makes sense.
-How do you think the viewer will accept the change in register?
I don’t know, I’m very curious. Maybe very well, maybe not so much. For example, it was difficult for me. It was like I already had the other thing caught. But I loved a phrase that Hugo Silva (Julián) said, which is that humor this season is seeded more slowly, that is, it has gags, but it sows situations that when resolved are incredible, but you have to be a little more patient.
-Edurne is plunged into a depression. Was it very difficult to find the tone when she breaks the fourth wall and addresses the viewer?
-No, curiously, it took me longer to get used to that code of looking at the camera and speaking in the first season, but once I understood it and saw that Marc was very clear about the point, it was better. And then the montage, which is one of the most important things in comedy, is incredible, it’s of Swiss precision. This season it has been the other way around, it did me a lot of good as a character, because the camera was that best friend that you don’t even talk to anymore; You look at him as if to say, what am I going to tell you? Sometimes it was hard for me not to look at the camera (laughs).
Hugo Silva and Leonor Watling.
-Fiction introduces the theme of the pandemic as one more plot. Did you imagine that there would be ‘balcony police’?
-I didn’t imagine anything at all, if I wouldn’t be a screenwriter. When I read the script I saw how good and fast they are, because we shot this a year ago and they wrote the scripts a year and a half or two years ago. But you also can’t imagine the series without the pandemic. It is a fundamental piece of the plot. In a series where such extraordinary and bizarre things happen, the strangest and most bizarre thing is the only one that is true and that we have all experienced. It looks brilliant to me.
-It is, saving the distances, a phenomenon similar to that of ‘The Morning Show’, which in just two years were able to condense #MeToo into a fiction.
-Yes, and they have told the truth. The feeling as an actress is that they have gotten to the bottom and all pushed by Marc Vigil, who never let you go. Comedy has the danger that as an actor you give your opinion about what is happening, that distance between the character and the interpreter, and the comedy that I like is the one that does not have that distance. With Edurne so depressed, it is very difficult to find humor there without commenting on Edurne and it is the milk that they have achieved it.
-Was it difficult to shoot with the pandemic?
-It has been complicated, but fiction has recovered much faster than the performing arts, for example. With an overexertion of production, micromanagement, a lot of PCR, a lot of space, but all with a feeling that we were very lucky to be able to work.
-Although fiction starts pulling stereotypes, it breaks them over and over again. Is it just a joke or is there an intention that the viewer reflect and dare to break with his own prejudices?
-That’s what I think is beautiful. Humor always starts with a stereotype. If there is not something in common that we share that is a preconceived idea of something, there is no humor that can be shared. But from there I think that writers and the creator can not avoid it. They can’t help but be compassionate, curious. In the end they are making characters and they are humanizing them and they are becoming three-dimensional and in the second season you get to know them much more. Nobody is flat.
-Lately we see more on television than in the movies. Is there any reason?
-No, really the projects that have come to me that have interested me the most are television. But I don’t care about the format or the genre, I care about what you’re telling, whether it’s oil on canvas or pencil on paper, it doesn’t influence me as an actress. It influences me if it is a series that you sign infinite seasons that you do not know what your character is. It is true that when you go back to making films you say: «Ahhh». It’s just that it’s different, it has another tempo, it’s something else. Your job is the same in the end, but it’s like being a writer and doing a weekly column or a novel or short stories.
-Does the irruption of so many platforms have any contraindications?
-I have no idea. I can give you my personal feeling and it is that I am overwhelmed, but in general, not only by fiction, by music, by the news, by social networks. I have so much information that I don’t know how to manage that I realize I’m turning off. And I’m watching series from five years ago. Let’s not be in a hurry either, nothing happens. There are products that will expire and others that will not. I think you have to try not to get carried away by those slogans of ‘the best series of the year’. When I can, I’ll see her and nothing happens.