Disney premieres this Tuesday the series produced by Salma Hayek and starring Natalia Oreiro, Ernesto Alterio and Francesc Orella
There are such important characters in the history of a country that they not only marked its history in life, but also after death. It’s what happened with Eva Peron, first lady of Argentina between 1945 and 1952 and president of the Women’s Peronist Party. Coinciding with the 70th anniversary of his deathDisney + premieres this Tuesday, July 26 ‘Saint Avoid’Argentine series produced by Salma Hayek that recreates one of the most unknown chapters in the biography of a woman who is a myth for a good part of her fellow citizens: the bizarre story of the disappearance of her corpse. Based on the homonymous ‘best-seller’ by Thomas Eloy Martinezthis overproduction of seven episodes shot in more than 40 locations and which has had 120 actors and 1,300 extras follows the unusual case of the journey of the embalmed body by Eva Peron. After the overthrow of President Juan Domingo Perón in 1955, the Argentine military forces that took power decided to hide the body to prevent it from becoming a weapon against the regime and that the people, seeing the incorrupt figure, begin to venerate it as if it were a saint. Sixteen years would last kidnapping of this wandering body without burial.
“Eva was a woman who could not be dominated during her short life and those men wanted to keep her body as if it were a trophy. I think there is a lot of similarity there with the fear that women with power continue to have now” , it states Natalia Oreiro, who here embodies a character that colleagues like Madonna and Esther Goris have already recreated on the big screen. The actress emphasizes that she wanted to make “an interpretation and not an imitation” of her figure, although, to be inspired, she took advantage of all the audiovisual material she had of her, as well as that provided by the Evita Museum in Buenos Aires.
controversial figure
The directors and co-producers of the series also had to demystify the character, Alejandro Macci and Rodrigo Garciaaware of “the controversy” that continues to generate the figure of this woman in Argentina. “It protected us that we were working from a book, that we were not doing a biography of Eva,” they acknowledge. Although some licenses were taken regarding the work. “The book is written in the first person, which I always interpreted as a kind of fictional Tomás Eloy Martínez. We took it further and created the character of the journalist [interpretado por Diego Velázquez] who is investigating the story 20 years later,” Garcia explains. “But, unlike in the book, in the series not everything is told from the point of view of that character, who interested us because he was someone who was not part of the Eva’s environment,” he adds.
Thus, the vision of the former first lady herself is incorporated (of which scenes from her childhood are shown as the illegitimate daughter of a conservative politician, her youth as an actress and her life with her husband), and of two men who obsessed with her: the Argentine soldier Carlos Moori Koening (Ernesto Alterio), who was commissioned to kidnap Eva’s body, and Dr. Ara (Francesc Orella), who took care of embalming it on behalf of Juan Domingo Perón (Dario Grandinetti).”My character is very complex because, starting from someone for whom maintaining order is something fundamental, that control begins to be broken because something begins to happen to him that he cannot control, which has to do with falling in love and even with a curse that he feels around the corpse”, explains Alterio. Orella, for his part, also highlights “the obsession” of Dr. Ara with “the myth of Eva”, a woman whose image “still covers the walls of the streets of Argentina today and fills its cities with graffiti”, as the directors emphasize. .