The performer who embodied Shrimp i cantinflas takes on the shoes of a Mexican inmate leader of the prison in the second season of the Amazon Prime series. Oscar Jaenada (Esplugues de Llobregat, Barcelona, 1975) is considered by many to be the Spanish Johnny Depp for the extravagant aesthetic he flaunts on red carpets and for being a specialist in getting under your skin – and swallowing your soul – of singular characters.
He returns to Spanish fiction with a character of his own. Muro is the leader in Nando’s (Jorge López) prison.
Muro is a tough guy, raised in the darkest part of Mexican society, who is serving a sentence for drug trafficking in a country that is not his own and what he is looking for is to use this knowledge he had before to prepare for his release from prison. And do it with an empire mounted. It’s been really cool work in terms of investigating what it’s like to be in an alien prison for so long and feel at home in such a despicable place.
And how has this research been?
I have two Mexican colleagues who have been through prisons for drug trafficking and I have talked to them about the experiences, the slang, the hierarchy that is established in these places… And above all, what is the most beautiful thing that you hope will happen in the day. To understand a little what it is not to have any kind of hope is almost the hardest work.
Muro is hopeless, but he seems to have everything under control.
Of course, it’s just that after that you have a shoot in your life. They lock you up in prison at 35 and you change your life, but you’ve been a different person for 35 years. In prison you will be someone else, because all the rules, all the hierarchies change. In prison you start from scratch. The studies are the same, the money… But, of course, there is a sediment. These whips of what was before was the interesting thing to rescue.
His Mexican accent impresses. Is that because he had to study it for his role as Cantinflas or because he works a lot there?
There are four markets in which I move assiduously and the Mexican is one of them. But I don’t know how to speak Mexican, nor Andalusian. When you prepare an accent, you do it on the lines of the script, but you can’t improvise. I dedicate myself to the practices of the sequence. And this is what you need to modulate with the recorder, to see where the inflection is, where you breathe… There is a dedication, which for Cantinflas was more professionalized. But the many times I’ve been to Mexico, if you ask me to do this interview in Mexican, I’d be very upset…
However, this work is noticeable.
There is a very hard job. Sometimes valued; in others, no. Sometimes despised; in others, overrated. But very hard, to get it right and not to be dependent on your accent, but on your eyes, which is where the magic is. Because sincerity is in the eyes.
You distinguish yourself by taking care of the image you project. He has also been in charge of that of Muro.
I grew up hearing that the actor’s job is the fault of the director and the rest, but I disagree. The actor is solely responsible for the work. When I receive the scripts, with my notebooks I create and imagine things that are later very far from what the costume or make-up directors come up with. But I always go with my proposal. Thus, because of the hatred he saw Muro had for being a Mexican prisoner in Spain, he thought it appropriate to give him a background of pre-Hispanic hatred. Do it like a very Aztec. Then I decided to get some tattoos of an eagle warrior, who were the Aztec warriors who first faced the Spanish in 1518. I also saw it as important to name his mother, and to show that his only connection to the world real is this woman any killer will adore. And I proposed it.
And they let him do everything he asks?
Then, of course, you talk to the costume design people to see if you’ll have the time you need to do them, and it’s getting limited. Muro also wears flip-flops to demonstrate this superiority he has in prison, his tranquility. That a guy who knows he owns this prison doesn’t need to run. These are all annotations that are obviously part of the actor’s work.
Is prior preparation essential?
This is like the Olympic games. Behind those 10 seconds in the 100 meters are four years of work. The same thing happens in our work. What we see is the result of the work. If we don’t like it, it’s because there hasn’t been one.