He is a renaissance man, he is interested in everything and has the rare gift of getting fully involved, without prejudice in each project. It is said that everyone likes him and it is true, how can you dislike a guy like Boy Olmi? Impossible.
Film, theater and television actor, director, documentary filmmaker, filmmaker, nature lover, host, “Bailando” participant, sentimental favorite of “Masterchef”. Boy Olmi is so curious that he could have been in Rebelde Way, in national film classics such as “The Search”, “Nights without Moons or Suns”, making “Circular Mirrors” directed by Javier Daulte and surviving a couple of reality shows with solvency. and also keeping intact the love of the public. His 30-year-old couple with the actress Carol Reyna It is one of the most beloved, the secret? They are genuine.
Leads the traditional cultural program “The exact time” along with Teté Coustarot, but these days he faces the challenge of going on stage with Soledad Villamil, Laura Oliva, Paula Ransenberg, Ailin Zaninovich and Tupac Larriera. He is one of the protagonists of “For me, for you”the hilarious Chekhovian comedy directed by Héctor Díaz.
News: He returns to the theater with a Tony Award-winning play, did that have weight when saying yes to “For me, for you”?
Boy Olmi: It is an important endorsement, but above all this work is a fabulous challenge because it is tremendously fun, commercial, popular and funny with a very deep substratum that is what links it to Chekhov’s universe. In the original, as you know, it is called “Vania and Sonia and Masha and Spike”, where three Chekhovian characters appear transported to another reality, with the conflicts of that world, but within a contemporary Argentine comedy that takes place in Villa Elisa, in a cottage. It is very nice to be able to handle these two planes simultaneously, the great intelligence that the author Christopher Durang has is to have developed such an original piece, that in the hands of a director like Héctor Díaz and a beautiful cast, it will give a very different result.
News: Does a director who is also a great actor like Héctor Díaz make a difference?
Olmi: All directors should know how the actor works because we are a very mysterious machine, the actor is his own instrument, so the execution obeys his own rules. We actors are weird because we all work differently, simply because people are different and also very similar deep down. An actor who directs has enjoyed and suffered all of this in his own flesh. It gives Héctor a certain advantage to know what things we interpreters go through when they ask us to solve something in certain circumstances. He is meticulous, intelligent and at the same time with a humor that penetrates very deeply.
News: At the risk of spoiling let’s reveal something, the character you play is gay. How did you deal with it?
Olmi: He is gay, but he is also wondering a lot about what happened to him with his life, with his ability to love, to enjoy and to fly freely. So we could ask ourselves what it means to be gay, is it that you like men? Is it that you don’t like women? Is it to have an active sexual life with people of the same gender? These are the things that Vania is questioning, issues that have been around for a while and that he covered up.
News: How do you create a complicity between brothers on stage?
Olmi: We are a group of actors that some of us had crossed more and others less, but we are experiencing what happens to trapeze artists, jumping and trusting that the other is going to catch you. And such confidence has been generated that every day we jump into that void to always land on the right foot.
News: When you directed the experimental short film “The man of the week”, which toured many festivals, everyone expected your feature directorial debut to come immediately, but it took 20 years until your first film, “Sangre del Pacífico”. Why did it take so long?
Olmi: I believe that life is a continuous process full of steps and some are higher than others, you don’t know what you’re going to find. When one in the world of cinema combines something seemingly so antithetical as poetry and the industry, as was the attempt of “Sangre del Pacífico”, it took me many years to achieve it. Not for lack of desire but because I needed an internal growth process to decide to do it. In addition to being a director, I am a producer because producing means making projects possible, I am usually busy with a lot of different things at the same time. Some as an actor, others as a communicator and director, as a human being awake to the experiences that life brings me… That’s why now I’m conducting television at the same time as doing theater, for example.
News: Regarding his role as host, “La hora exacta” is a program that bets on general culture with a format where timing is very important. Did you take special care of that in your duo with Teté Coustarot?
Olmi: It seems to me that when one is generous and honest, the tools that they bring are put at the service of any project. Teté is a fabulous professional, with knowledge and management as a journalist and host that is admirable. I have a much more playful imprint, of letting myself go through the emotions that are generated at the moment. “La hora exacta” gives me the chance to also follow a personal moment where I reflect on what human beings are doing on Earth, those stimuli that are songs, movies, books, lead me to enter through different windows and wonder where we come from, how we are and where we want to go.
News: Speaking of where to go, together with her partner Carola Reyna they rented a motorhome and made a rather peculiar trip. How was that experience?
Olmi: You saw that life is a journey and the couple is another journey within that one. With Carola we have spent three decades of love, companionship, fun, attraction, that sometimes leads us to have established routines and other times to break them in search of the necessary surprise to stimulate us. We really like travel, people, nature, and although I have a more trained life than Carola in extreme habitats because I have directed films in the Aconcagua, in the jungle, in the glaciers, and she is more urban, we wanted to specify Something that would combine all of that a bit. So we resumed this postponed dream that we had of traveling in a motorhome. After the pandemic we said: “Let’s get on a wagon and go for a tour.” We first went to Mendoza and we had divine experiences because we had designed the tour based on great diversity, from uncontrolled hippies to non-stop haute cuisine (laughs), from ranch parcels to wild nature, nights with truckers , meditators, artisans and with artists, it was a very full experience that we want to continue.
News: He just had an experience that I don’t know if it was wild, but it sure was unique. It is not something that is widely known, but you acted with Daniel Day-Lewis in the Carlos Sorín film “Eternal smile from New Jersey”. We need you to tell us how that filming went.
Olmi: It’s true! (laughs) It was a delicious trip, not only because we filmed in Patagonia but also because Daniel Day-Lewis He is one of those monumental actors that we, from our place in the profession, greatly admire. I played a couple of scenes together with him and I enjoyed them a lot. It is a film that was hardly seen in Argentina because there were disagreements and for me it was a great pleasure to be hand in hand as I am with you, but with Daniel Day-Lewis. He had just won the Oscar with “My left foot”, imagine, a guy with enormous sensitivity and great humor. Although it may not seem very funny, he was very tempted and at some point we couldn’t work because of what he laughed at, we had a very crazy scene and for me it was a kind of privilege that such an actor was tempted by something that I was proposing to do.
News: In Masterchef you proposed something quite original, a prawn-based dish that took you back to your childhood and that sparked an unexpected controversy. Did some believe that there is a childhood for prawns and another for Milanese?
Olmi: It gave you something interesting to think about, all stigmatization is dangerous. Defining a person by an anecdote is very limited, it seems like nonsense, but it is not, the dish of my childhood is not prawns but the food that we all made. I reflected on the fact that once my grandfather took us to eat prawns and I was fascinated, it was a resource of the moment, if that generates a belief that categorizes a person it is something very small. Masterchef is a wonderful experience, it takes cooking as a trigger for the emotions that it generates in the participants, it is nourished by the feelings that emerge and that is why it is such a successful product.
