After the global success of La Casa de Papel, Úrsula Corberó decided to stop for more than a year, take a breath and rethink a career between Hollywood and Argentina, to return to Spain with another promising project: El Cuerpo en Llamas.

With enviable energy, Úrsula Corberó (Barcelona, 1989) arrives on the hot morning that officially marks the beginning of summer. A large international team will accompany her during the photo shoot that illustrates these pages. “I don’t know if I speak English, Spanish, Argentine or Catalan”, the actress admits with a laugh before getting under the brushes of the makeup artist who will be with her during the almost twelve hours of work in which she will do everything possible to raise the spirits of a group as diverse as the one that surrounds her. “I need to create a pleasant environment around me. When I am doing something where I am the essential piece of the whole team structure, I have to make sure that people are happy so that they can work in good conditions”, she will admit days later, sitting over an iced tea in the bar of a central Madrid hotel. “It is something I do for myself, not for others. It makes me feel good”, she admits sincerely.

Corberó kicks off with this session the promotion prior to the premiere of El Cuerpo en Llamas after its filming, her first project in Spain after the end of the series that gave her worldwide fame and changed the rules of her game, La Casa de Papel. Tokio, the leading role in the fiction created by Álex Pina, caused the actress’s face to become known throughout the world and also, after the broadcast of its last season at the end of 2020, she decided to take a break to think and decide where to continue with her career. A year and a half of hiatus that for anyone else could have been an insurmountable setback. “It was good, but then reality came. And the reality is that people don’t know you as much, that your followers drop”, she says confidently. “It was a fairly premeditated decision. I felt that my body and my head wanted to rest a little. Not only because I had just worked a lot, but also because of everything that happened after La Casa de Papel. Life has turned us all upside down and I felt like I wasn’t capable of making good decisions”, she continues. “I thought: ‘Well, you better stop, relax a little, honey, lower your frequencies and when you know what you want, go for it’. Suddenly I was in a bad way. Everything was falling apart. I lost my way a bit too. What now? What is the next step I have to take?” she admits honestly. How does someone find their compass again after such a difficult professional and personal moment? “I have been in therapy for many years. Since I was 17”, she confesses.

Leaving behind a character that caused requests for the mixie cut – a mix of mullet and pixie – to multiply in hair salons around the world meant making the leap to Hollywood with poor English after a stop in the British series Snatch, the adaptation to the small screen of the Guy Ritchie film released in 2000. During the final moments of La Casa de Papel, Corberó set her sights abroad. “I learn English by going to film a series in English and without speaking English”, she recalls with laughter. “I hire a coach – I suddenly realised that he was the best in the world – who tells me: ‘Hey, it’s incredible, but you have spectacular phonetics. Do you understand what you’re saying?’ I replied: ‘No, I don’t have a fucking clue'”, she continues, amused. From that experience came the definitive leap to the mecca of cinema – with a few stops in Argentine auteur cinema such as Matar al Jockey, her next film directed by Luis Ortega – first as the Baroness in Snake Eyes, an action film inspired by the G.I. Joe universe; then with a short film from the Star Wars universe, Visions – “I haven’t shared anything on social media, I’m the worst at promoting” –; an action feature film that will be released in 2024, Lift; a couple of projects that she can’t give away and, in between, a visit to The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon that is now history. “I think they called me because someone dropped out”, she explains with the emotion of someone who still can’t believe what happened despite the fact that more than a year has passed. “My boyfriend is with me, bless him. I told him: ‘Either you come or I die'”, she remembers. “I was nervous, but something happens to me that has to do with the camera. Before anything happens I shit myself, but when I see her in front of me I grow up”, he continues. “I was behind the curtain while they were introducing me, they brought me a bag and I thought they were giving it to me in case I wanted to vomit until they explained to me that it was to leave the mask. The only thing I had in my head was: ‘You can’t vomit and you can’t shit yourself’. The only thing,” he admits between loud laughs. There he spoke about his then newly-found friendship with Madonna, whom he met on a plane and whom he saw again at the party that Saint Laurent organized at Miami Art Basel on the occasion of the reissue of the controversial book Sex on the thirtieth anniversary of its publication. Yes, the Queen of Pop is also a declared fan of Tokyo.

His full-scale approach to the reality of the major international studios comes at a critical time for his sector. In May, a strike was declared for screenwriters; in July, a strike for actors. The stars showed solidarity with all members of the Actors Guild, supporting demands such as increasing the lowest salaries, ensuring residual income [what an actor earns each time the series or film in which he appears is re-run, something that has been reduced since the emergence of streaming platforms] and protecting artists from the indiscriminate use of artificial intelligence and possible abuses. “It scares me. I feel that it is completely getting out of hand”, says Corberó. “It is about ensuring basic rights. I have always been in favour of people having freedom of expression, going out to demonstrate and going out to fight for what they believe is theirs. What is happening seems horrible to me”. The situation, at a national level, is not excessively encouraging either. “There is a false image because of what Hollywood projects. Only because there are a few actors who are doing very well, but being an actor is not that. There are those who are really suffering. And people who are having a hard time, who come here to Madrid and work for years as waiters. There are a thousand things going on”.

Soaked in the reality of working on the other side of the Atlantic, Úrsula Corberó accepted her next leading role in Spain, but not before mulling it over for a long time. The actress overcame her prejudices and finally decided to play Rosa Peral in El Cuerpo en Llamas, the Netflix series that premieres on the platform on September 8 and delves into the Crime of the Guardia Urbana, the name by which the murder of Pedro Rodríguez in 2017 was known and a media case that monopolized hours of television and even had its own true crime format in four installments hosted by Carles Porta. Peral and her lover, Albert López, were sentenced to 25 and 20 years in prison respectively for homicide after burning her then-boyfriend in his car. “It is a very delicate subject and it made me think a lot about being part of this project. I did not want to fall into sensationalism or morbidity or patriarchy”, explains the actress. “When they offered it to me I had heard hints about the matter and the truth is that I didn’t know the case very well. And it really caught my attention. There are so many men who kill their wives and this kind of follow-up is not done…” Corberó insists that this project is more fiction than reality, something that is pointed out at the beginning of each episode with a superimposed notice on the screen. “People are not used to seeing a woman in the police force, a mother, a murderer and sexually active. That’s why I was very afraid of getting involved in this project. I thought there was a character there, although I didn’t want to add more morbidity or more objectification to this real story”, she admits.

Under the direction of Jorge Torregrossa and Laura Mañá, and alongside Úrsula Corberó, the series stars Eva Llorach, José Manuel Poga, Isak Ferriz and Quim Gutiérrez, who plays Albert Lopez, the character with whom Rosa Peral creates the deepest, most morbid and passionate bond –the relationship, in the series, is practically based on the insatiable sexual appetite of both–. The acting couple already worked together in a light film with a very different tone to this project, Who Killed Bambi? (Santi Amodeo, 2013), exactly a decade ago. “Working with Úrsula again has been an exercise in complicity, trust and comfort. We had many shirtless sequences and that is always somewhat unpleasant. You can disguise it however you want, but there is a degree of discomfort. “It’s been fantastic to feel comfortable in physical nudity, but also in creating an emotional space between these two characters that is very peculiar, very dark and for me very enjoyable”, explains Gutiérrez in a message to this publication. “As in all reunions, you inevitably take stock of what has happened. And this one is very positive. It’s nice and almost a relief to realize that it has been like this for both of us. I am older than her and I can say from the license that age confers on me that it is very cool to see her maturity as an actress. She has known how to take advantage of everything that has happened to grow”, he adds.

Seasoned in great television series of the last two decades, it all began for her with the jump after several Catalan series for TV3 that meant the role of Ruth in Física o Química, a production by Carlos Montero that served as a precedent in 2008 to what would later be seen in Élite. Úrsula was then 19 years old and “had a very different energy”, she admits. The cast became regulars at the most varied parties in Madrid and Corberó acknowledged in a viral interview in 2016 that she reappears frequently on social media having perhaps had too much fun in those years, something that did not sit well with all her colleagues. “It is something I am working on, it is okay to make mistakes. Feminism is also about that. My mistake was talking about other people’s private life. Say yours if you want, but don’t bring others in. Lesson learned. I was wrong”, she admits humbly. “Although now I think about it and it is a bit funny”, she adds mischievously. A firm believer in expressing how she feels at any given moment with the words she considers appropriate – “I don’t like to keep a low profile. Not at all” – the actress has also had no problem speaking openly about her relationship with actor Chino Darín, with whom she has been in a relationship for seven years and with whom she forms one of the most stable couples within the Spanish star system. “I have already experienced in other relationships the thing of keeping things clandestine and being very reserved, and I realized that no, in the end it doesn’t work. There will be people for whom it does, but for me, because of the way I am, it didn’t work out”, she explains. Their relationship became even stronger after being forced to spend the confinements caused by the pandemic in Buenos Aires, in the Darín family home. “I was like shit. Then I realized that I shouldn’t have been so hard on myself, because I was aware of the situation that a lot of people were experiencing who didn’t have the same resources or the same privilege as me, and I didn’t give myself permission at that time to feel bad. I realised that I had the right to be in a bad way, just like anyone else, I was 13,000 kilometres away from my family”, she explains. “All of this added to the fact that you are at your in-laws’ house and you don’t want them to see you in certain situations. I was completely unhinged. I would wake up happy one day, and five minutes later I would be crying. What a person”, she explains again, laughing despite the dramatic nature of the situation.

At 34, Úrsula Corberó can allow herself to make a brief assessment of her personal life. “I feel that I am fine, in a good moment of my life and my parents have always instilled in me that getting older is good”, she says. “There are some things that I didn’t expect to be like this. I have always visualised myself as a very young mother, but then you realise that reality is different and the years go by”, she admits. It is at this significant moment that she has been encouraged to take the step of collaborating with Save the Children. The actress is the first Spanish global ambassador of the NGO and travelled last July with a team from the group to the Kolda region, in Senegal, to learn about an initiative that seeks to end child marriage. “It is the first time I have told it and it makes me excited”, she says. “I am still processing a lot of things from the trip, I knew that I had to prepare myself for this type of experience. It was something that until then I had not felt strong enough to do and suddenly I had it”, she says. “I went there thinking I was going to teach the girls a lesson, but it was the opposite. I came back completely confused”. The projects under development aim to show the girls the reality of independent women, mentors, who have managed to avoid child marriages due to economic necessity.

Before saying goodbye, the actress shows off the mastery with which she has been treating fans of the seemingly never-ending global phenomenon called La Casa de Papel for over three years when a group of excited tourists ask her if it really is Tokyo, unable to believe what they are seeing. Laughing, she deceives them, plays with them, lets herself be loved and almost jumps like her character to finally admit that yes, they are in front of the person who embodies the fictitious thief in a red jumpsuit. “I love these moments”, she admits, amused, before leaving the place where the interview is taking place and surrendering to the very high temperatures of a Madrid at half speed, rocked by the start of the holidays.

Source : vogue.es

How do you bury a character that made you a global pop icon? Betting on another no less scandalous. The actress faces the curiosity of becoming Rosa Peral in the series about the crime of the Urban Guard, a case that shocked Spain in 2017.

Do not be fooled by the photographs that accompany this text. Úrsula Corberó no longer wears minimal bangs. And she will not return to that aesthetic in a while due to professional logic. It’s not a frivolous tidbit for whom she turned her hairstyle into a pop symbol. Hair, as Phoebe Waller-Bridge pointed out in the Fleabag series, is everything. And hers was the photo that an army of girls spread around the globe has taken to her trusted hairdresser in the last five years. They all wanted her bangs, blunt a few centimeters from her eyebrows, framed in a short mane that stylized her neck and exposed a black choker. The one that was inspired by Natalie Portman in León, el profesional (1994). The one that has ended up becoming the Tokyo hairstyle from La Casa de Papel. The hair of her character, which subtly mutated during the five seasons that the second most watched series in the history of Netflix lasted, became in 2018 “the most requested by the porteños”, according to the Clarín newspaper. And it didn’t just happen in Argentina. Corberó herself remembers going to Barcelona and coming across multiple clones from Tokyo. She was always stunned. “Hairstyle is one of the things that, don’t ask me why, is crucial when creating a character. And if I want to move forward, I need at least two projects in which I don’t repeat aesthetics. No one has asked me, but I had to tell myself: ‘As much as you look pretty and think it’s your style, if you’re smart and think like an actress, you have to let your bangs grow,’ she says in a telematic conversation, with a ponytail and without a trace of him, on a Saturday in September, admitting that he is in “full phase of mental imbalance”. For her next project, she touches melena. She will be very long, straight, straight, jet. She couldn’t be less iconic for who she represents.

Although we are in the same city, the calendar of this Barcelona interpreter is gibberish for a face-to-face meeting. At 33 years old, Corberó faces the filming of El cuerpo en llamas, the Netflix miniseries that will fictionalize one of the criminal and sexual scandals that has generated the most social debate in Spain in the last decade: the crime of the Barcelona Urban Guard. She will be Rosa Peral, the local police officer sentenced to 25 years for murdering her boyfriend, police officer Pedro Rodríguez (played by José Manuel Poga in the series) in May 2017, along with her ex-lover and also a member of the Albert Corps. López (Quim Gutiérrez), in a bizarre triangle that had public opinion on edge. An ideal case of sex, lies and mobile messages ready to be consumed in vein and exploited in the golden age of true crime. The one in which we compulsively gobble up —and in most cases, promoting sexual terror— the narration and recreation of crimes that drink from reality.

“I know that there is a lot of morbidity around Rosa Peral, but if I let this role go, I was going to die of rage. It is very difficult to find leading characters with that weight, nuance and depth”, says Corberó, and confesses to having taken more than reasonable time to debate whether she agreed to become the condemned after the impact of La Casa de Papel. Assuming the halo of collective fascination, he measures her words: “I approach the case with the utmost respect. My opinion about what happened does not matter, that is what the judges are for”, she insists on several occasions, holding back. So much so that she ignores, smiling, the question of whether she has gone to visit the condemned woman to work on her character: “I’m not going to answer you”.

Corberó wants to dive into the gaps of a character who has become an archetype of a noir erotic thriller from the nineties. As if Peral had been reduced to version 2.0 of Linda Fiorentino in La última seducción. Hers, she says, will be a polyhedral vision beyond that flat moral of the femme fatale. “I think that if it is so intriguing it is because people have a hard time imagining a murderer being a mother and sexually active. That’s what blows their minds; but these cases, unfortunately, happen”, she explains. The series wants to bring more layers, humanity. “This is also the story of how a woman can be buried. In my character there are many information gaps, and that is the most interesting thing about this project: exploring the grays. Because, even if you have done a horrible thing, that does not mean that bad things cannot happen to you too”, she clarifies.

In mid-September the first images of the project were leaked with Corberó in a minidress, long hair, red lips and hoop earrings. The internet fandom approved the casting instantly. Something that Jorge Torregrossa, creator and co-director with Laura Mañá of El cuerpo en llamas, already sensed: “Úrsula has the enormous charisma and magnetism that Rosa Peral demands. Her talent and playability add depth and dimensions to a very complex character”. The one who was the director of the series Intimidad —here he repeats the script with Laura Sarmiento— assures that seeing the Catalan in action is “a revelation”: “Her Rosa Peral is also vulnerable, and her interpretation is going to bring new light to the reasons that led her to commit such a crime”.

The protagonist knows that if she has said yes to this series it is because she is going. “There are projects that are done out of romanticism and others out of interest to reach other goals. I make Rosa Peral moved by my guts”, she reveals. She is awaiting the release of the action thriller Lift, she has also shot another movie in New York that she cannot reveal more about. Projects that she faced after a year and a half without working after finishing La Casa de Papel. A self-imposed professional break that led her to ponder what steps she should take after a series that made her so famous that Madonna stopped her on a plane and told her that she was also a groupie from Tokyo. “This impasse has not been pleasant”, recalls the actress. “I have asked myself some very strange questions and I have lived through it with ups and downs. After such a heavy thing you say to yourself: ‘Okay, now comes the decline, right?”

Her relationship with her career prospects is not to be taken lightly. Corberó has dealt with exposure since she was a child, since she made an advertisement for a bank with magnifying glasses and understood that this was her destiny. “More than being famous, I think I dedicate myself to this because I always experience pleasure showing myself to the world. I like knowing that people are watching me. In that ad, for example, I didn’t care if I looked ugly, I was delighted because I knew it would be something that would be seen. It still happens to me”, she clarifies.

Until becoming Tokyo, the Catalan had experienced what could be imagined as a gradual process in the construction of a successful career before the platforms. He sang in a children’s group (Top Junior, who shared the program with Tom Jones in Música sí), achieved fame in his homeland thanks to the Catalan midday soap opera —the scenes of Ruth, now accumulate hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube—and made the national leap by moving to Madrid at the age of 17 and participating in that adolescent hormonal bombshell that was Física o Química (FoQ)—he still stings that “we all fucked with everyone” that he said in an interview commemorating the series and that went viral without remedy: “I had to apologize to several of my colleagues”, he recalls—. After FoQ, and with the feeling that she had stuck in the role of the funny cock (Perdiendo el norte, Cómo sobrevivir a una despedida), she called the casting directors Elena Neira and Yolanda Serrano to find a way out of her. They understood that Úrsula would have to be Tokio. The rest is television history.

The earthquake came when La Casa de Papel went to the international Netflix catalog in full confinement. It became ubiquitous. He didn’t have to move to Hollywood or learn English to start with a romcom hinged on a blockbuster. She was already a global icon, only the entire planet was watching her locked up in her house. She was too. “It was a very rare experience. I spent the pandemic in Buenos Aires, away from my family. I went to see my boyfriend for 10 days and stayed for four months [she refers to Chino Darín, with whom she has had a relationship since 2016, when they filmed La embajada together]. There he hit everything and, if I’m honest, for me reading the pandemic is horrible, somewhat macabre. It completely blocked me, I had a tremendous mental cocoa. I was up and exploding on Instagram, with followers from India to the United States, and I spent two weeks promoting with crazy zooms, pretending everything was great and cheering people who were having a terrible time when I was the least suitable because it I was saying from the privilege”, he recalls.

Corberó now has 23.5 million followers on the social network he is talking about. And she is beginning to assume that number may change. “Since La Casa de Papel ended, they have been going down. At first it distressed me. He told me: ‘Am I going to lose them all?’ That series gave me an international following and ad campaigns. That’s a lot. But I have had to remind myself that nothing happens if they fall. That, in reality, they were not my fans, but from Tokyo. And if they followed me, it’s because I did my job well within that label, which was a much bigger project than me. I have to remind myself that I am no longer Tokyo”, she repeats calmly, as if trying to internalize that statement again. In constancy, and in understanding that in this life nobody gives anything away, Corberó comes with the assumed lesson.

Born 33 years ago in Sant Pere de Vilamajor, a town of 4,000 inhabitants in the Vallès Oriental region of Barcelona, ​​this daughter of a carpenter and a mother who has been a cleaner, a fishmonger, a dental clinic assistant or whatever it took to carry Money Home understands what’s at stake with every project. “I don’t come from an elite family, but in this profession it’s often taken for granted that I am. In 2008, when the crisis exploded, they interviewed me and asked me what my parents did for a living, and I said: ‘They are unemployed’. Everyone laughed at the answer, they thought he was joking. Those prejudices always surprised me, here not everything is glitter”, she clarifies. She says her background gives her perspective to keep her feet on the ground: “Being from the fringes hasn’t made me feel like an outsider in the industry, but it has made it easier for me to understand this game. If I talked to my friends in town like on the red carpet, they would say: ‘Who are you trying to sneak in?”

She thinks we live in a very punishing society. “Self-esteem is confused with things going to your head and with being believed. And sometimes we also confuse being professional with being complacent and submissive. It’s exhausting being a woman and feeling like you can’t screw up. I have felt guilty many times for not knowing how to stop someone or not having said what I thought. It’s understandable: you don’t want them to think you’re a diva. But you are neither being true to yourself nor expressing your needs. I’m learning how to say no. Now I say: ‘This makes me uncomfortable'”.

As her next leading lady, she likes to be liked. “Sometimes I want to think that Daft Punk were the smartest because they became famous without most of the world knowing what face they have, but then I say: ‘Bah, if I go from low profile. I love to brag about good things. “My boyfriend is the complete opposite of me, always discreet, but why shouldn’t I be able to feel pleasure in sharing that things are going well for me? Yeah that’s fantastic!”

Source : elpais.com