Prestige is that carrot after which many professionals run and Pilar Gamboa he has it because he earned it. It is not only a matter of work but of dedication and she knows it. Pilar is reckless, she goes forward, she gives her all. Whether she is with the theater group Piel de Lava with which she shared various works until she exploded in the phenomenon of “Petroleum” and that epic movie that is “The flower”, or kick all the sets until she becomes a true scene stealer, because it is impossible not to watch her.
Pilar is an actress without fear and that is why she does not avoid industrial cinema either, she is the protagonist of “30 nights with my ex” (Patagonik), the film in the Adrian Suar he not only acts and produces, but also makes his debut as a director and can be seen on the big screen from August 11. There he plays “The wolf”, an ex who could have been the crazy one in the family, but in Gamboa’s body she becomes a character as complex as lovable.
News: You’ve worked on first films by various directors, I’m thinking of “The Fire” by Juan Schnitman, for example. But this time who makes his directorial debut is Adrián Suar. Let’s play the game of the differences between debut films, how was the experience?
Pilar Gamboa: Suar has more production than Schnitman! Beyond the joke, they are different languages, although being a debut feature, perhaps the nerves of both may be similar. In the case of Adrián, I think he had already filmed movies without filming them, everything was in his head, he was almost editing live. His way of filming was very impressive because Suar has something of having worked a lot as a film actor, of knowing the language of his films. I say this myself, although I never discussed it with him, it seems to me that the journey of directing his film surprised him, he had it all clear, but he let himself go through the experience.
News: And the Suar companion, how is he?
Gamboa: A very pleasant place to work was set up because he didn’t know everything. Well… he did know them all! but he was very permeable, he listened and asked a lot, always very willing to work as a team and that seems important to me. I think there was a desire for a newer adventure than “another Suar film”, I felt that way. He is a guy who is encouraged to question his ideas against the opinion of others and for me, who has been working in a group for so many years, it was easier to decode what the dynamics were like, we all entered there as if through a tube and had a spectacular time.
News: Speaking of working in a group and an adventure, what was it like sharing this high-profile film with Elisa Carricajo, her friend and partner in Piel de Lava, with whom she lived a thousand stories in the theater and in independent cinema?
Gamboa: It was spectacular! It’s like your most complicit accomplice in the world arrives to witness your greatest adventure. I did a lot of commercial things and so did she, but they are not our waters, we are more frontier, we play quite a few keys.
News: “30 nights with my ex” addresses a topic that is more in the conversation than ever, that of mental health. Before the premiere and without seeing the film, reactions already circulated on Twitter. Did you think when you read the script that the mental health and comedy combo could be controversial in the networks?
Gamboa: As a healthy weapon I don’t have Twitter, so it’s almost no social networks. I manage with Instagram and Facebook, I’m a lady! (laughs). When the script arrived I thought it was a challenge to act my character, I laughed a lot when I read it and that already seemed like a lot. Later, when I met with Adrián, we talked about how to make something real out of that material without solemnizing it and without making fun of it.
News: How do you interpret a character like this, respecting his condition but allowing himself humor?
Gamboa: For me the issue of mental health was always very closeI had friends and a grandmother with problems of this nature, for example. It seemed to me that it was good to give it truth, it’s a bit like how I work acting, trying to embody with the greatest possible emotional sincerity. It was a huge challenge to do “La Loba” and I feel like I played it honestly, I didn’t hold back a single one. I did it with a true boldness of intuition. I faced her thinking that despite her condition she doesn’t have to be a boring person. We all suffer from anxiety, phobias or stress, what happens is that even today it is a little talked about topic. We wanted to make an endearing character, human and also funny. Humor for me is the lifesaver of life. I don’t know if it went well or badly, that will be judged… on Twitter (laughs).
News: What you say is interesting because you have starred in a phenomenon like “Petróleo”, which spoke about many topics with corrosive humor. Do you use it as a tool?
Gamboa: Yes, because I believe in opening up genres, not in categorizing them into compartments like comedy or drama. Humor is a tool to reflect on other things. You don’t laugh at the character but at his circumstances. I don’t like actors who laugh at the character they are playing, or who feel above what they are acting, that distance when you see the actor with a certain relief, the wink type: “Well, maybe it’s not me, it’s a character”. There is little risk there, I bank the characters with fewer planes, with more edges, of those that you laugh and after two minutes you ask yourself, what happened to me, why am I crying.
News: There is that saying that opposites attract, you are in a relationship with Ignacio Sánchez Mestre who is a playwright, actor and director. Is it better to share life with someone who is in it?
Gamboa: It happened to me like this, I don’t know, one can also fall in love with a dentist… I can’t even tell you how great it would be (laughs). But with Ingu there is a place of understanding, of companionship, also of fight with respect to how we think things, there is a very fiery exercise of dialectics. For us it is essential to be able to think, speak, discuss and agree, there is a certain thing about being in the same dance with which we connect.
News: Also, let’s face it, unlike you, Ingu has Twitter.
Gamboa: Yes, he has Twitter and he tells me everything: “This guy put such a thing and I replied that you are the best.” I ask him not to do that because he embarrasses me (laughs). I tell him “it looks really bad because you are my dorm”, but he is convinced that he needs to respond. The truth is that, although I don’t have an account, many times at night while I’m nursing Ana I say “read me Twitter” and here we go. In the end I snoop Twitter full.
News: Her children, Manuel and Ana, are very young but in the film she plays the mother of a teenager, how did she get along with that?
Gamboa: I had already done the mother of a teenager in Las Vegas and when they offered me the role it was a shock, I said to the director Juan Villegas “But at what age did this woman become a mother? At 14?”. And he answered me: “Notice that no”. There you fall into that the accounts close even if one never proves his own age. In “30 nights with my ex” my relationship with Rochi Hernández was put together from work, she is divine, loving, a very good actress, wanting to enjoy every scene. In acting, it is not necessary to have gone through a bond to interpret it, although motherhood is something that you act better when you are older and the experience opens you up to the concept of guilt linked to motherhood. We worked on it with Rochi, because I thought that “la Loba” is someone who feels guilty for what has happened to her.
News: “La Loba” has plenty of guilt and lacks punctuation marks when speaking. It is not the first time that she plays extensive dialogues. How does her memory operate when it comes to acting?
Gamboa: In theater, the months of rehearsal are very useful to me, there you fix the text in parallel with the way you find the interpretation. Obviously there is a time when you feel like a child at school, it is to sit down, read and memorize. You study it with music and the funny thing is that later you get to rehearsal and very likely your melody does not match the one that others have in their heads, so when you modify it, that strange feeling of losing it begins. Javier Daulte once told me: “The text must be learned in such a way that you can forget it forever.” Knowing it so much that the viewer thinks you don’t know, that’s very magical.
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