Popular film, theater and television actor born in Tetuán in 1943, Miguel Rellán was given a good scare by Covid-19. He talks about everything without fear. He is on tour with ‘Una noche con los Clásicos’, shows with which he pays tribute to Adolfo Marsillach. It amuses her to say that he may have the face of an idiot. He knows very well that he is not. And he feels loved.
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Fully recovered?
– Taking into account that I was about to palm it, I’m divine. Fortunately, many of us have survived. [al Covid-19]. A younger brother of mine passed away. The pandemic has left many families wounded. I spent twenty-two days in the hospital and then another twenty-four isolated at home.
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That remember?
– I felt bad, but as I am always in good health, I said to myself ‘this is a flu, tomorrow it will go away’, and when I realized it I was surrounded by some men dressed in green who looked like astronauts. I woke up in the hospital. I asked one of the doctors: ‘Maria, am I dying? It’s that I’ve never died and I don’t know, but I feel terrible, very bad, very bad’. It’s not that I was caught up in thinking about death again, because I’ve known for a long time now that I’m going to die, so I came to say to myself: ‘Well, if it’s now, it had to be sometime.’ As Juan Ramón Jiménez used to say, ‘I will die and the little birds will continue singing, nothing happens’ [la versión más que libre de la cita es original del propio Rellán]. Although, man!, I prefer not to die to give the can for a while longer! [Ríe].
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What is on the rise?
– The payroll of stupid is rising exponentially…; We’ll see what the planet can take before kicking us all.
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What did they tell you and do you remember it well?
– My mother told me something that, apparently, she had said in her day [Winston] Churchill: ‘Money doesn’t change people, it discovers them’.
And Miguel Rellán adds something else with respect to what his mother told him, which had previously been said by the English politician, statesman and historian, whose slippers and a glass of brandy were even auctioned off. “It’s,” he notes, “like when I hear that someone’s been a jerk since he’s famous. And is it not, rather, that he was already an idiot before and now, as he is famous, we have realized?
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And what doesn’t usually happen to him?
– I’m not bored. Listening to people who said that they got bored a lot during the confinement, he asked me: ‘How is it possible, with the thousands of books that there are to read? If we were in the 17th century, but now that you can be confined to a room with access, too, to all the cinema you want. I could have been isolated not 24 days, but 24 years.
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What would be convenient?
– We all think stupid things, all of us, but the wise keep them quiet. We are in a time in which people release without any filter the first thing that comes to mind, there you go! We already know, for example, that social networks are the equivalent of the bar of a lifetime, where there was always someone, with the fourth gin and tonic already in the body, saying something stupid; but he did not pass from there. But now… At least the drunk guy could tell you the next day: ‘Forgive me, I messed up.’ But it is that all these… The lack of respect and education in the fecal networks is terrifying.
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What kind of society do we have?
– A society, in general, banal, superficial, consumerist, noisy, in a hurry, very silly in general and very influenced by fashion. A society that is terrified of silence, among other things. All the proverbs, which I don’t know why they are Arab and not Czechoslovakian, are usually right. One says: ‘If you can’t improve silence, shut up!’ Another question that I think we can ask ourselves is: ‘Why are we in such a hurry?’ Hurry, hurry, hurry…; The other day, a friend told me that an acquaintance of hers had become very angry because her plane from Los Angeles had arrived in Madrid twenty minutes late. But, let’s see, idiot, you just crossed the Atlantic Ocean! Let’s see, the fact is that as soon as you are careless you are one more of the herd, you also have to be attentive to that
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What is not possible?
– You can’t live alone. That wonderful loneliness thing is very good as a story, but in reality you can’t, because we are social beings and we need others. How we need not lose hope. It is true that the negative makes a lot of noise: any idiot with two drinks jumps a zebra crossing and kills a man or a woman, and it’s news. Now, it is not that there is, working in silence a team of people doing an organ transplant operation for hours. And I, as long as, for example, there are people who know their job very well and who exercise it very well, with dedication and for the good of all, I will have hope.
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What are you in no doubt about?
– I may have the face of an idiot, but I’m not: I’ve known for a long time that, as I told you before, I’m going to die. What’s more, I’m 79 tacos and I’m about the age to go to another neighborhood; nobody is going to say ‘damn, with how young he was!’. If you have to sink your beak, then sink your beak! Many people have died and nothing happens, the world goes on, although, I insist! I prefer to be here.
“They still are”
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What did you come to think?
– I think that at some point we all think, with the pandemic being so horrible, that ‘what we are experiencing is going to make people change’. And no, good people are still good people, and sons of bitches are still good people. I was now reading things about these scoundrels from the commissions for the purchase of masks, Luis Medina [hijo del duque de Feria y de la modelo de alta costura Naty Abascal] and these [su socio Alberto Luceño Cerón], which have taken 6 million euros of commission. Fortunately, there are still wonderful people next to these bastards who, with the pain of others, take an awful lot of money in commissions to spend on luxury cars.
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What else doesn’t enter your head?
– If we talk about Spain, there are three fundamental things that are missing in this country and that nobody cares about. They are, in alphabetical order and with vault sound: education, education and education. With all of that implies. And apart from that, we are at a time when it is clear that what prevails in the world is greed. First me, and save yourself who can! That there are many people who find it difficult to get warm because they cannot pay for gas or electricity, that doesn’t matter to those who fill their pockets. It cannot be that a third of humanity is starving and that a few accumulate such enormous wealth. There we also have this gentleman [Elon Musk] who bought Twitter for $44 billion, but how much money does this guy have? I do not understand the mind of human beings.
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And despite everything…
– Luckily the pandemic, although now we are with the war in Ukraine, which was what we lacked, it has caught us on the good side of the world, where we were born and live, because despite all the sorrows we are on the good side well; You already know that typhoons and tsunamis occur in the other part, as well as horrible famines… Here we are great, with our wine, our beer, and delighted with life, we live like God. Until, suddenly, a virus appeared, something invisible, and everything faltered. What a horror movie: in the hospital I watched St. Mark’s Square, the Champs-Elysées on television… all empty. And while the Ice Palace in Madrid converted into a morgue to house corpses.
“What I can”
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What are you doing?
– On the tomb of Max Aub it reads: “I did what I could”. I do what I can.
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Are you considering quitting work?
– Of course I don’t plan to stop working, why should I? Any moderately sensible person who engages in creative work does not retire. Does Vargas Llosa, who is already a Nobel Prize winner, retire? Is the painter Antonio López retiring? The only thing that can take you away is health. But I still have to play King Lear!
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There are those who propose to ban ‘Lolita’, by Nabokov, or ‘The Catcher in the Rye’, by Salinger, or…
-…. that we are fools, that there is a part of the world that has become an idiot. That doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense. They are nonsense, but they do not stop enclosing their danger. It’s not a wave of conservatism, it’s a wave of supreme stupidity. Everyone offended without stopping offending everyone, everyone offending without stopping getting into the lives of others.
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Politically what?
– My grandfather, a very educated person who greatly influenced me, when I was little he told me, ‘look Gary’, he called me Gary because I was tall and thin like Gary Cooper, ‘when you hear someone talking about his ideology , of what he thinks, of how he is, listen to him with respect and, when the gathering is over, follow him and observe what he does. One is what he does, not what he says. It seems to me that the thing to do is act. My grandfather was the one who discovered that I am a left-wing person. What can we do [ríe].
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How did you experience the good result of Marine Le Pen in the French presidential elections?
– A sensible person, as I pretend to be, well, afraid, because the wave, I don’t know if it’s conservatism or extreme right-wing in the world, from Trump, Orban, Bolsonaro, and here the rise of Vox, is like being afraid. Let’s go back, it sounds dandy, gray, black and white again, a ban, those soldiers who said not long ago that I don’t know how many millions of Spaniards had to be shot. I hope we react. It is also that the left -we are much more critical-, when the time comes, instead of going to vote, they abstain. Go vote, man!
the same wars
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How was your experience with ‘An Evening with the Classics’?
– Wonderful. Why is Shakespeare made? Why do you do ‘Richard III’ or ‘Macbeth’? Because you are talking about now, because the human being is still the same. How is the Ukraine war different from the Peloponnesian war? Now with tanks and before on horseback. The human being is still just as wonderful and asshole. If everything has already been said in ‘The Iliad’ and in ‘The Odyssey’. Homer told it all and Shakespeare finished it off. And as for our classics, what wonder, what beauty, what intelligence! Now, all the great ones talk about four fundamental things of truth: love, death, power, sex, and what derives from all that: jealousy, betrayal, loyalty… The Americans, who are very pragmatic, they say that it all comes down to two things: someone looking for something or someone running away from something. He had yet to work in the theater with Don Adolfo Marsillach, and now, thanks to his daughter Blanca [juntos en escena], I have the opportunity to pay tribute to him and even, through technology, we recite some poems together. Beautiful poems by Lope de Vega, Calderón, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz…