Carmelo Gómez: "The headlines said that he was the best actor in Spain and I believed it like an idiot"

• Teatro Carmelo Gómez, the star he did not want to be: "Before feeling like a failure and feeling the horror, I decided to leave the cinema"

Life changed for

(Sahagún, 1962) in the back seat of a taxi eight years ago.

There he decided that the cinema had finished and that he only cared about the theater.

And in those he continues, sitting in his dressing room at the Teatro Bellas Artes before a performance of

, based on the memory, on the family inheritance and on the novel by Miguel Delibes.

.

What is your family heritage? That of a peasant father and a mother who has to be a woman in hostile terrain.

I fought tooth and nail not to be a peasant and to show that he could do something else.

Maybe it wasn't necessary so much, but my life is a struggle, and even more so with a conceived inheritance that doesn't do you any good. Why so much struggle? the childhood.

As time passes, you realize that almost every effort is wasted, that the enemy does not exist and is within you.

But to understand it, years have to go by and you've already left your nails on the battlefield. Has it been worth it? I have achieved what I wanted, more than I dreamed of and I owe that to that cinema in La Movement that needed people with a new energy.

And it suited me well

I made great movies so I don't regret what I did at all.

Now I can go quiet because that already occupies a place in the history of Spanish cinema. Was that your obsession?

That he was comfortable with what was left? I did this to prove to myself that it is possible, that fighting, digging and working finds talent.

And sometimes I have used excessive energy, all the strength in the world, but it is not until time passes and you know yourself as an artist that you know that the most subtle notes become almost without force. Let's go back to the village, how do you remember your childhood ?Mine was a hard childhood, I was very lonely because I didn't belong to any gang.

I have always been classified as a weirdo, but I have only had a special sensitivity since I was a child, like my mother.

And that empathy has made me suffer for things,

how was the killing of animals in the town because it was better with them than with the kids.

I've always felt isolated and a weirdo, really. That's similar to bullying, right? It's the beginning of the

, all societies need someone to point the finger at, a scapegoat.

And when one appears, that's it, he receives all the blows, that was already in the peddler of Machado's poetry.

But I have felt that I was better alone than with the kids. Have we lost the concept of community of peoples? Globalization has ensured that there are no borders or limits to the free market.

And the free market is obviously pure trade.

In the end it was trade, it was not freedom.

There is the World Cup in Qatar because they have more money to bribe politicians.

That is the problem of globalization, how easy it is to manage the masses, who in a globalized world should be prepared and are not.

JAVIER BARBANCHO

This world hasn't allowed it either, because everything has gone too fast, without control, without limits.

Now we are all very modern and we are going very fast, but we don't even know what we think and we are going to vote without knowing what the responsibility of voting is.

We are all under the same thought because the falsely called culture is nothing more than Big Data now.

We no longer have our own criteria and that worries me in young people because we have not generated valued elements so that each one has it.

The opinion seems more and more to the common one and although the society is more intelligent and more prepared there is much less relation with the essential of the human being.

We have a problem with the narcissistic ego, we think we are the most handsome and we are closed to everything outside.

And if there is no contrast, nothing evolves, we are a dead society.

Are we underestimating the tension that surrounds us? The masses are hysterical and disinformation seems to be necessary so that nobody is scared.

Putin is a guy who, instigated by the United States and its neoliberalism, which is a system that only lives from confrontation, takes the same path as Hitler, becoming totally godlike beings and capable of conquering the world.

They have an arrogance and a pride that goes above sanity and they are going to take whoever is needed in front of them.

Europe has a problem because it has to give a sense of peace while facing a monster and neither China nor the United States help because we are the enemy to beat.

And, as people are hysterical, they end up voting for the one who shouts the most, Vox, because we have forgotten the dissent. There we must add the economic interests I do not know who has played the cards badly,

but this was coming a long time ago because we send our companies to China and India to be able to pollute without laws, we buy oil from tyrants and the United States manages everything.

We have managed everything wrong and we are eating our false morals. How was the arrival of that strange and lonely boy in the world of cinema? I was not prepared for what happened to me and I said a lot of nonsense.

And there are still people determined to say them, but not anymore.

You come into this world and overnight they consider you very important and you come to believe it.

That is why a family environment that stops you is important, it got a little out of hand for me.

It was the awakening that I had never had and I had it suddenly in three years.

The headlines said that he was the best actor in Spain, I looked at myself in the mirror and believed it like an idiot even though it was a distortion.

When did you discover that it was a distortion? We all make mistakes in life in a more or less violent way until we realize it.

It's a slow process, like planting, and now all the grain is in my barn.

JAVIER BARBANCHO

How have you gone eight years without making movies? It turned out very well and I didn't think it would be like that, it was a matter that made me suffer.

It cannot be understood that you are everything and from one day to the next you are nothing.

There is born a frustration that can sink you, that's why my pride made the decision to end everything before it finished me and I returned to the peace of the theater, poetry returned to my life. Did it see itself sink and that's why it left it Was it a spur, it can't be that you don't sleep and that nothing works.

There is nothing worth a life, but it costs because the next day you think otherwise even though the decision was made.

It was in a test for a series, I was in a taxi with another actor, I saw the distrust in the tests, I told him that I had come this far and it was my last time. It is also giving up a position of privilege, above all,

Economic There comes a time with age when not everything is money because you end up spending it badly.

As is my case, he was an absurd spender.

Now I have a lot less money and I can be happier.

Now I have done the Lorca project with a trailer, my partner as director and Mijaíl, a Ukrainian pianist friend and we almost had to thank them for hiring us, we got almost nothing, but I have not done anything with such enthusiasm. And even so, it has back to an Imanol Uribe film I did that because Imanol is a friend and he asked me to, it's like a carpenter who stops working and his friend asks him to put two doors.

He does.

What I don't want is to enter the industry, because there I feel tied hand and foot, humiliated in the tests and there are no films I want to make.

But of course I miss it, I really like the camera and she loves me,

but things change and cinema is more industry than art, as is happening to theater. Are you thinking of retiring? It can happen at any time, but there are many factors.

One is that people now only want births, people don't pay 20 euros if it's not for fun, they don't want to listen to Lorca's poems because the emotion doesn't amuse them.

The theater is a place to provoke emotions that we no longer have in daily life and if we want to go just to de-stress or disinhibit ourselves, it is useless. Have we given up on depth? Practically, yes, we have changed everything for a meme and you feel that you are no longer good for anything.

There you have to make a decision and there I am because not even the national theaters have a responsibility despite being financed with public money.

When you go to direct one think that and if not leave the position empty,

but you cannot be at the service of everything except the artistic. Have you felt that at times positioning has hurt you?

I have felt very harmed by things that I have said and by others that I have not and have been taken out of context.

That's why I prefer the radio, I'm sorry, but there nobody manipulates me or cuts me off and I have the feeling of being faithful to what we are talking about.

I know I make a lot of headlines because I'm serious when they ask me important things.

I have read and I know how to speak when they ask me about these things.

You should be a little more frivolous. Going back to retirement, have you thought about what will come next? Everyone says that I won't be able to, maybe they're right, but they also told me about the movies and here I am.

Although the cinema had left me and the theater will never leave me.

I don't need a big producer in a chain with new Italian shoes up the ass, with a car and a trailer, that's it, I have my life figured out.

And I will return to the local, to my town, I will set up a small company to bustle with the kids and I will sow the field with my brother.

I think one day that will come.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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