Javier Rey
.
Noia, 1980. Actor.
Velvet
gave him the popularity and
Fariña
, the awards.
Since then, he has been riding and climbing like the cyclist he wanted to be.
Now she stars in
La casa del caracol,
by Macarena Astorga, which opens in theaters tomorrow.
Your character digs into the past and gets into trouble. Do you look back a lot?
I am quite balanced on this. I look ahead, but I don't shy away from reviewing the past when it plays. Thanks to this work, many times things arise that you would not have considered in life and help your self-knowledge. I like that. I don't usually have great fears of facing my past or myself.
What has that extra self-knowledge given you?
I think that being an actor you become a more tolerant person because, in the end, our job is to understand why the character does what he does, lives as he lives, feels how he feels. We are not robots, everything always comes from our past, from tastes to our way of getting angry, loving, judging ... What was Dad like, what Mom was like, the environment where I grew up, it was lonely, there were many people ... All those kinds of things you ask yourself about the character you are going to do and, when you discover the answers, you end up being able to put yourself in the shoes of almost anyone. That is why even when I am touched by a potentially destructive character or who, in the view of the viewer, is not a good person, it is not difficult for me to empathize with him. I apologize because I know where things come from.Unless you have a mental illness and are a manual psychopath, it all comes from Mom and Dad.
It is a movie directed by a woman. There is a fantastic boom in female directors, which was until recently the great deficit of Spanish cinema.
To work is exactly the same. Ultimately the common language in our trade is talent, regardless of gender. It has been a slow process. When I got into this, there were already women on the camera crews, but if you ask older actors, they'll tell you that until 20 years ago there weren't even one. But there weren't any makeup men either and now there are too. Obviously everything is opening up, I already see an absolute naturalness in this matter. At last talent conquers sex.
The pandemic has caught you in your full explosion. Has the pause helped you absorb the changes?
I have neither considered myself nor do I consider myself an event. I think what happens to me is the consequence of many years of work, which sooner or later was going to end up happening to a greater or lesser extent. I embraced what you call an explosion very naturally because it was not so different from what, before
Fariña
, I also experienced with other television series such as
Velvet
. Also, one thing is your workday and another thing is life. I'm not an actor 24 hours a day, so I don't feel like a slave to work or a
boom
. There are little things that have changed, but little else.
'Velvet' was seen much more than 'Fariña', but the prestige came to you with Sito Miñanco.
Yes. Please note that
Velvet
in Latin America everyone saw it when there were no platforms, but they are different projects with different audiences.
And a different actor?
One more done. I am a better actor than ten years ago and in ten years I will be better than I am now because it is a natural evolution in this job. Everybody improves. To me
Fariña
taught me a
lot, a
lot, a
lot, but I've done other projects that have not had much impact they have also taught me Mogollon. In the end it all adds up to being the actor that I am today.
What 'Fariña' does seem to have done is to open the cinema door for you.
One is choosing paths depends on the moment. Now everyone tells me that it shows that I make more films, but I have never denied television. Nor will I deny. TV is really my home, it's what I've done the most in my early years with the theater. I am from a generation of actors who no longer care about the format, whether television or cinema, I am guided by the character that I like the most, that challenges me the most or that is the most different from what I have done. That has been more cinema lately, but it is not a deliberate decision. I'll be back on TV for sure.
What did it mean for a Galician kid from the 80s and 90s to get into the skin of a character like Sito Miñanco?
It involves a lot of responsibility. There are characters that appear in your life and they are poisoned candies: that if your work and the squaring of the project go well, you come out very reinforced, but if not ... And you don't know that when you accept. You play it, you get in there and, if the result is not as expected, since you are the visible face, they give you sticks everywhere. In the case of
Fariña
, obviously, everything turned out perfectly.
Preparing the interview by reading previous ones, you always reveal very little about yourself. Have you made the brand image of the mystery?
Yes, it is something on purpose. I mark an immense distance between my life and my work, which is what I am paid for. I'm not interested in anything because of modesty and because I think that when you know a lot about an actor's personal life, you end up seeing him and not his characters. What I want is for people to now think that I am Antonio Prieto, my character in this movie. And period. It is the only thing that interests me and as the years go by I am more and more blunt with this matter. Everything else that is said or published about me, I do not care. I have reached a point where if they put a headline where they say that I have caused the global pandemic, I will not even go out to deny it. That they believe what they want, that they put what they want, I continue with my life. It doesn't affect me at all.
Being so discreet, does it affect you to constantly see your relationship with Blanca Suárez in the media?
No, I get along because people have no fucking idea, basically. So it makes me very funny to read some things that I read. Sometimes I get so far apart that I see it as an experiment. It's like, "Oh yeah? Is this happening to me?" In the end the important thing is that my mother knows how I am, that my brother knows how I am, that my friends from Noia know how I am ... That the people I love know who Javi Rey is. From Javier Rey, the actor, let them think what they want. If you pay the ticket to go to the movies, you can say that you liked it or that Javier Rey has made a poop. You have a right to that. But that's it, my personal life is mine.
You don't seem to have the exhibitionist gene that is associated with interpretation.
Perhaps because I am not a vocational actor. My story is very unromantic in that sense: I wanted to be a professional cyclist. I've always been a very bad student and I come from a very athletic town, I grew up in that: running, playing soccer, futsal, volleyball on the beach ... Everything, everything. When I realized that sport was hugging me at a hobby level, but at a professional level I was a true
loser
, I had to look for something else. My notes were rubbish and the interpretation by people who crossed my path appeared. Then I saw this possibility of having a future work although I am very modest. Xosé Manuel Esperante, who is a fabulous Galician actor, is the great culprit that I am an actor because he was the first person who saw an actor in me and pushed me. I didn't even decide!
Acting and sports are similar in that they are extremely selective professions: many of us dream of being one, but you get very little in both.
Yes, yes, I have come across many people on the path that was aiming higher and due to life circumstances, it suddenly did not arrive. The talent is always there, but the trade has to be watered or it rusts. And if you are not given opportunities and insecurities arrive ... There are many great people who are prepared at home, but the reality is that the cake has a specific volume and there is not for everyone. It produces a very hard selection.
How do you wear the official handsome tag?
The labels they put on me are quite the same, but I am very funny about that because all my first characters were a bit
nerdy
.
I've never looked particularly handsome.
Don't fuck around, man.
Let's be serious.
If you stop to think about it, and I'm going to say this in quotes, I started to be handsome in
Velvet
.
Nobody talked about that before when they talked about me as an actor.
But in my thirties, all of a sudden, I became handsome to a lot of people.
Well, if there are people who think I'm handsome, okay, it could be worse, but I haven't based my career on beauty.
The good thing about being a relatively normal guy is that if they put an Adonis next to you, you can be the nice buddy.
I don't think that role is going to fall for you much.
Yes, man, yes, there are very beautiful people.
No, yes already ...
...
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