Despite the success of Soy Georgina and Through my window, Netflix’s Top 10 has a production that does not lose its crown as the queen of popularity: I am Betty the Ugly one. The Colombian soap opera premiered on the small screen for the first time in 1999 and, 23 years later, it continues to be a resounding success, this time in the streaming era.
However, its stars did not always have pleasant moments on the set of the production, since Jorge Enrique Abello shocked his fans by revealing that some of his scenes as Don Armando “were hell.” This was commented on his YouTube channel.
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Not everything was rosy
Abello has a videoblog-style section called Yo soy asi, in which he recounts some of the best-kept behind-the-scenes secrets of Yo soy Betty, la fea. In that sense, he revealed the great stress that some of his scenes demanded.
“Recording in the Ecomoda boardroom in the studio was hell. (…) Fernando Gaitán, our writer, wanted there to be a reality regarding everything that was being talked about the market, the industry, fashion, the whole financial aspect because it was very important for the viewers, especially for the who know the industry, who knew that what was happening contained truth,” he said.
In this way, the actor explains that there was a scene in which Don Armando is trying to propose a business to his partners, but the plan was to deliver a proposal under which he would obtain a lot of profits without delivering what he promised: a kind of scam.
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In that sense, in order to achieve this, Enrique Abello had to combine not only the dialogues of his character, but also the figures that his role had to expose to demonstrate the handling of the matter and sound convincing. That’s where it gets complicated.
“I was 29 years old at the time. I had only studied acting, literature, communication, direction, arts. I had no idea – as I do today – of what finances are, of how the economy works, of what administration is, so I was speaking advanced Chinese”, confessed the artist.
In addition to the complex lines that he had to learn, the tedious thing was also in the time in which he had to do it. Thus, the popular Don Armando commented that the filming of the series starring Ana María Orozco lasted between 14 and 15 hours a day, after which he would come to his house to memorize his “parliaments” for the next day.
“But I had to learn it and I had to say it exactly as it was in the script to be able to do it. In order to achieve that verisimilitude. In other words, if I made a mistake in a comma, if I missed a point, about two points, if I said the wrong word, (…) everything was going to be a mistake, “she said.