Itziar Ituño, an activist in a business class ad

Luis Alemany Madrid

Madrid

Updated Tuesday,16January2024 - 11:32

• Interview with Itziar Ituño, after the 2018 controversy
• 'Intimacy' Itziar Ituño, a mayor in the midst of a sex scandal

Many of the interviews by Itziar Ituño (Bilbao, 1974) are a bit similar and many are interesting, they are spun by a voice that expresses itself well. In every interview, there's a moment where the actress is asked how the public's hostility to her political activism affects her, and in all of them, she politely answers more or less the same. He replies that it does affect him a bit and that he doesn't think it's fair and insinuates that there is a structural reason for these moments of fury. But she avoids going into the matter, telling what leads her to demonstrate with associations in defense of ETA prisoners, which is the act that, periodically, reaches public discussion. Ituño did so last weekend in his city, at an event convened by the Sare association, and BMW and Iberia, two firms that used his image as an advertising claim, cancelled their collaboration with Ituño.

If anything, the actress is tempted to explain who she is in order to legitimize herself. "I come from a working-class family, from a neighborhood, I have my social conscience and I'm going to continue with it, I don't care where life takes me. I have a feeling, an opinion, I think I have the right to express myself as long as I don't hurt anyone and I'm going to continue to do that. I am who I am and this is what it is," Ituño said in an interview published by EL MUNDO at the premiere of the series Intimacy (2022). "I was once in a factory, making refrigerators, a factory that just closed in Basauri, and I wasn't happy; I had a monthly salary, but I prefer to have seasons where you don't know what life is going to be like and others in which to work while enjoying yourself," he explained in the pages of Noticias de Guipuzcoa in 2014.

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Bilbao.

BMW dissociates itself from actress Itziar Ituño after her presence at a demonstration calling for the release of ETA prisoners

• Written by: EFE Bilbao
• Written by: EL MUNDO Madrid

BMW dissociates itself from actress Itziar Ituño after her presence at a demonstration calling for the release of ETA prisoners

Television.

Itziar Ituño, after declaring Maduro a fan of 'Money Heist': "I don't know Venezuela. If he invites us to a premiere, I'll go!"

• Written by: ANDREA M. ROSA DEL PINO

Itziar Ituño, after declaring Maduro a fan of 'Money Heist': "I don't know Venezuela. If he invites us to a premiere, I'll go!"

The other reference that always appears in Ituño's interviews is the university: the actress studied Sociology at the UPV and what is implicit is that a graduate in Sociology must have a critical attitude towards reality.

"It is not lost on anyone that no media outlet is innocuous: they all have a political line. For me, the objectivity of the press often leaves a lot to be desired. I say this because of what I have experienced in my own person. I'm not new, because I studied Sociology, but I thought we were a little bit ahead. Is there still a witch hunt? Well, yes. There was something good, that I had the opportunity to meet Willy Toledo. And he told me that, in theory, this is a democracy and there is freedom of expression, but it's not true: you can lose your job for speaking your mind. And it's terrible that this exists today," Ituño also told EL MUNDO, in 2018, after being criticized for participating in a video that called for ETA prisoners to be brought closer to the Basque Country.

A brief chronological account: Ituño was born into a Spanish-speaking family and learned Basque in the classroom. After his degree, he worked at Fagor and frequented the amateur theatre circuits of his city. When he mentions his vital and cultural references, many of the classics of his generation appear: the punk music of the gaztetxes, the Latin American protest song, the travels through Peru and Bolivia, the innocence of the discovery of the global world... The curious thing is that Ituño's way of life seems faithful to that memory of an idealized nineties youth, while his professional career has moved, to a large extent, through channels that are not at all alternative. "I must be too politically incorrect," Ituño told EL MUNDO in 2018. To make BMW commercials, maybe so.

When the actress was still an amateur, Basque public television recruited her for Goekane, "La calle de arriba" in Spanish, the longest-running, most successful and conventional telenovela of the EiTB. Nekane, Ituño's character, arrived at that kind of Basque EastEnders as a young woman who was recognizable and fragile and evolved into a lonely woman, a commissioner of the Ertzaintza hardened by the disappointments of life and a little confused about her sexuality.

At the same time, Ituño did more risky work. The best known was Loreak, by Jon Garaño and Jose Mari Goenaga, perhaps the first of the independent films in Basque to reach Spanish-speaking audiences: the kind of intimate, lyrical and almost minimalist material that has become common in auteur cinema in the last decade. At that time, Ituño said that his career was in the Basque Country, that he could not imagine himself in Madrid, that he was very aware of having a place in the world... Reality changes all of our plans.

Priimero (2017) had a role in Cuéntame cómo pasó, a role as an ETA terrorist. Her character's name was Koro, and she moved in a certain dramatic ambiguity, in the mold of the attractive woman who made terrible decisions. And she played the Basque joke. When a character appeared with a leg in a cast, I would say: "If it doesn't get better, tell me, I have a saw lying around." And then, I applied a laburu-shaped mold to a cake I had made and that was probably very good because the time of Cuéntame was that of the new Basque gastronomy.

Then came Money Heist, first on Antena3, the role of Raquel Murillo, the Madonna who suffered in the assault on the Bank of Spain, which put her on the Netflix and commercial TV circuit when the series became the great global project of the Spanish audiovisual industry. For the record, there is no bad review of Ituño's work. Even in the partially unsuccessful Intimacy, the actress was flattered for being able to create a character that was impossible to simplify. There, Ituño played a mayor of a party that looked a lot like the PNV, that was not the most moral woman in the Basque Country, and that was more in favor of the system than against it... But that she became a victim of that system when someone recorded her having sex and then disseminated the video.

In the 2018 row, Ituño published a message paraphrasing Bertolt Brecht: "First they took the communists, but I didn't care because I wasn't; They immediately took some workers, but I didn't care because I wasn't either, then they arrested the trade unionists, but I didn't care because I'm not a trade unionist; Then they arrested some priests, but since I'm not religious, I didn't care either; Now they're taking me, but it's too late." She then appeared in France's Mask Singer in the role of Lady Gaga.