Ricardo Darín: "I'm tired of being a consecrated actor"

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Ricardo Darín (Buenos Aires, 1957)

playing the prosecutor Julio César Strassera has a lot of pleonasm, a redundant gesture, because of the myth that copies the gestures of another myth.

The best-known (and beloved) actor of those who walk along Corrientes Avenue in Buenos Aires in the afternoon plays in

, which premieres on Friday, the magistrate who dared the unthinkable: sit on the bench the military responsible for, among other atrocities, more than 30,000 disappeared.

's film

hits billboards a few weeks after Argentine Vice President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner suffered an attack.

Once again, the violence that seemed exorcised makes an appearance.

Darín reflects on the past, on memory, on the different processes of democratization 'from there and from here', and on, once again, the weight of being a myth.

A myth that eats another myth.

Prosecutor Julio César Strassera died in 2015. Did you get to know him personally? No.

Like all Argentines, he had a fairly clear idea of ​​his personality due to his public appearances, on television, but I did not agree with him. It is a recurring question, but how heavy is the responsibility of giving life to a historical character that everyone Do you have, or do you think you have, a more or less clear idea? I haven't given life to many real characters in my career.

Dislike.

But in this case it was different because we didn't try to imitate it.

There was a lot of discussion about whether to spend a huge amount of money on post-production to match the color of the eyes, mine and his.

But it was discarded because the idea was to make our own Strassera.

Respect and prudence, but without copying anything.Did you feel the responsibility of lending his image to almost an Argentine myth?Of course,

but as the days went by I grew accustomed to his modesty.

What reassured me the most was knowing her sense of humor.

That made me very close to him.

It does not fail, there is no intelligent person without a sense of humor and who is not convinced of his insignificance. How do you remember the time of the trial?

You would have been 29 years old then. It was a moment of democratic opening and the atmosphere was exultant.

But what I remember best is the feeling of twinning, of fraternity.

If only by contrast to what is happening right now.

Despite all the economic problems and political uncertainties facing the country, the climate was hopeful.

At least in the beginning.

Then came a stage of uncertainty, of doubts... And so on until the unimaginable happened.

That democracy, that a civil court,

went to judge the military was received as something miraculous.

For all of us who lived through that moment it was something indelible, unique, that we experienced as something that would happen once in a lifetime.

After so much suffering...The film strives to illustrate that more than a political issue, it was a personal issue for the entire Argentine people...Yes, beyond political assessments, we must try to put ourselves in the shoes of those who suffered in their own flesh the loss of loved ones and they did not know if they were alive or dead.

I know some.

The disappeared remain in a cruel limbo that perfectly illustrates how cruel the dictatorship was.

For the relatives, the trial was an incredible balm because for the first time they felt that they were not alone in their pain, that there was a society, a State,

that offered them at least some understanding.

Then came the closing argument and sentences;

and hand in hand with the latter, the disappointments.

But beyond that, the relevant thing was that the trial existed.

The trial started the only possible path.

Without him, everything would have been different and worse. When the film was presented in Venice, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner had just suffered an attack.

Santiago Miter, the director, said that this broke the consensus that had emerged from the trial that violence would never happen again... I don't know.

It is true that the trial served to establish new rules and put a stop to the violence.

But to put an end to it, I don't know... The truth is that everything about the attack caught me jumping from country to country and I only half found out, depending on whether I had coverage or 4G.

I postpone answering this question properly until I arrive in Buenos Aires.

Of course, what I can say out loud is that I declare myself against all kinds of violence and aggression, whether against the vice president or against anyone.

Violence does not correct violence, it feeds it.

And this seems obvious, I think it should be repeated given the time we are living.

It's all so weird.

If the bullet had come out of the gun, we would now be immersed in a chaos that I don't even want to imagine. Why do you think that dictators were tried in Argentina and not in other countries, like Spain? to the Board in Argentina is a historic event worldwide and, honestly, has been ignored in Argentina and in the rest of the planet.

It has not been given the importance it had.

How can it be that this is not talked about in schools?

As far as Spain is concerned, it is a recurring question that they have been asking me for a long time.

The only thing the movie has done is update the issue.

Why hasn't anything similar been done in Spain?

I think that each community has its own maturation processes, its process.

The time will come.

But I doubt that the Spanish and Argentine cases are equivalent, neither in the number of deaths nor in the time that has passed since everything ended.

I dare not inflame the subject any more than it seems to me to be inflamed.

I want to believe that the time will come when Spain definitively uncovers the pot of its dictatorship... Seeing the evolution of the extreme right these years in Spain, perhaps it is proof that it has been prudent not to have done anything...

Or perhaps it is not having done anything that has caused the extreme right to emerge now in all its splendor. I see you with doubts... I am not at all sure what is correct.

The only thing that occurs to me is to be prudent and respectful of the pain of others.

I repeat, each society has its own maturation times.

There is too much accumulated pain. He spoke before that he finds it outrageous that they don't talk about it in schools.

This is also very current in Spain where the Democratic Memory Law is being processed with all the debates on the surface... We are tired of hearing the commonplace that history is told by the victors.

Even if true, that does not invalidate the value of memory.

The problem is that you can forget history, but it doesn't forget you.

The story always catches up with you.

The problem is that in the times we live in, memory has ceased to have value.

We live in a time when everything is forgotten. What do you mean? It seems that we are more informed than ever and it is not true.

Digital technology makes us live in the immediacy of data accumulation.

The processor is not enough.

The boys handle themselves better than my generation because they were born into it.

But in any case, it is as if we live in a kind of conspiracy against memory.

We live inside a machine gun of data whose only reason for being is the permanent forgetting of everything. Who are more important: the heroes or the cabal officials? The heroes do not exist.

What we mean by heroic is simply normal. Let's explain. I'll give an example.

We go down the street and see that a group of six is ​​attacking a poor defenseless man.

If we go out to help him there will be someone who will say that we are heroes.

And no, we simply act accordingly in an act of justice.

A common, simple guy with low self-esteem will be considered a hero in this society if he does what he should. Perhaps the problem is that we have ended up turning the inadmissible into something normal... Yes, we see people on the street sleeping rough and we take it as part of the landscape.

We are drugged.

And what about climate change?

We spend the day talking about it with a serious expression and we do nothing!

The truth is that we are a complicated species, very complicated. Last year they gave him the Donostia Prize, this year he has returned to San Sebastián in the scent of crowds, they say.

How much does it bother Darín to be Darín? Before coming here, to this interview, he was in the bathroom and,

as it always happens that I'm in front of the mirror, I started talking to myself and said to myself: "I'm tired of being a consecrated actor".

I would like to be a promise.

I don't know, I look at myself and tell myself that I have to do something about it, because this isn't going to go well.

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