Luis Tosar: «Comfort for an actor does not exist»

Luis Tosar recognizes that «the feeling of uncertainty of the first day in front of the camera it never changes. «It makes me feel the same nerves as at the beginning. The night before I barely slept. He makes me very nervous. It is a sign that the profession is alive and imposes itself on me. The experience adds a lot all the time. you make yourself smarter and more effective when acting. Over time you know what doesn’t work for you. What doesn’t get you anywhere, the resources that are useful and those that aren’t. If you are smart, you know how to see yourself and you are improving,” says the winner of three Goya awards for ‘Mondays in the sun’ (2002), ‘I give you my eyes’ (2003) and ‘Celda 211’ (2009).

That uncertainty adjusts and mutates over time. «From a certain age you have other fears. You wonder how long the good streak will last. Luckily, I have always been able to work regularly. But there are always times when suddenly nothing appears to you. There are always months of drought in which they don’t call you or get new projects and you get scared again. It is something that never ends, because comfort for an actor does not exist,” underlines this reference of national cinema for years who will share a talk with Greta Fernández, Leonardo Sbaraglia and María Leónwith the TVE journalist and writer, Carlos of Love as moderator.

The other side

Tosar assumes that a distorted or at least partial image of his job prevails on the street. He recognizes that the audiovisual sector itself is largely to blame. «There is much more to this job than the glamor of premieres and red carpets. Fortunately [risas del actor]. It is a complement and it is true that it is the most visible. It must be recognized that in the last ten or fifteen years it has become much more acute. There was a moment when we received a message, neither official nor obligatory, because we went to the Goya too much to hang around the house. They wanted to change it so that we would get closer to the North American format. That it was more ‘show’, a showcase to give greater volume to the awards. All as part of an attempt to glorify them,” explains the interpreter.

«We have given so much importance to events that sometimes they pass us by. At premieres, sometimes there is so much ‘show’ that in the end the film seems worthless. There are films that absorb it without problems, but there are others that do not. For some it is an accompaniment, a support, but for others they end up being buried. In intimate cinema, all that pageantry does not go well. We have all become homogenized. Social networks have done a lot in that regard. They help the little ones to go where they otherwise would not be able to. But they have another side and that is that they trivialize the product. That’s why I think every film needs its own type of communication. You have to be careful. You cannot trivialize all content with videos on Tik Tok. Machinery sometimes eats you and I think we all need to slow down a little. It is part of the process of adaptation to new forms of communication and technology. Nobody knew its consequences, but now that they are starting to get the hang of it, you have to know what is good and what is not. “This avoids the trivialization of the profession,” she defends without ambiguity.

Contribute to society

Luis Tosar has made a place for himself in the contemporary audiovisual imagination thanks to characters in which the dark and evil side usually prevails. «It is part of the human species. There are certain things we do that I don’t know if they are good, because they can seem like truly despicable heroes. But that is part of the dichotomy of being human, that attraction to the dark side is permanent and leads us to fantasize,” he says.

It recognizes that getting viewers to travel through unknown situations or places of the human soul is a very attractive challenge. «It is difficult to do, but we invite some characters to psychologically visit and then you come out transformed. I don’t know if the interpretation will be the best or the worst in the world, but there are some that change parameters in people’s minds and produce a transformative effect. Open your eyes to everyday situations “that have a strong social burden behind them and that often go unnoticed, because in society we look more at figures than at people,” he denounces.

The abusive Antonio, his character in ‘I give you my eyes’ it’s an example. «It was not easy to do. At times, it was quite unpleasant and I was lucky to do it with Icíar Bollaín and Laia Marull. It involved diving in undesirable places and being faithful to the testimonies of real people to make it recognizable. Over time, thanks to the movie, many people realized that code. He moved a gear they didn’t control in the brain. That is our great contribution, that people candecipher things you don’t know and who lives on a daily basis. Rarely do we put face and heart into them like we interpreters do. If I can extract something from 30 years of profession that helps me die peacefully, it is that I have left something good behind, in addition to pure entertainment. Achieving a minimum of transformation is the greatest gift. Many people have told me that as a result of that film they realized that they also suffered abuse,” says Tosar.