His life starts like a Marsé novel. María del Pilar Peña Sánchez grew up in Gavà, a beach town near Barcelona, where her parents, Pepa and Antonio, managed Frankfurt Dusseldorf, next to the Maragall cinema. The usher, Mr. Ramón, let her into the universe that would draw her imagination. At the age of 15 he found his artistic name reading La casa de Bernarda Alba , where the candles were candles. With three Goya awards - only Carmen Maura and Verónica Forqué surpass her - Candela Peña, 46, is one of the most versatile actresses in Spanish cinema and one of the least known for the control she establishes over her private life. Her tongue-in-cheek way of speaking has made her famous as strong, when vulnerable: a daring girl who speaks her mind. She premiered in the cinema as a prostitute inDays numbered ; after 34 films, he stars in The Wedding of Rosa , Iciar Bollain's new comedy about mothers who forget to live. And it takes up the Hierro series (from Movistar +). On this island, she has been isolated for four months writing a series about women over 40 years old.
Does your mother still work at the bar?
They closed it eight years ago, when my father fell. I had lung cancer. The metastasis reached his brain, his leg failed, and a client took him to the hospital. Not out.
Didn't you know your son?
He died the day I came out of accounts.
There is no Maragall cinema either ...
Until I was old enough to help out at the bar I saw too much cinema. Everything: from cannibal Holocaust to Godard. It has not done me good, but it has saved me. There was no television at home. Not that my parents were hippies , they worked all day.
Was there no TV in the bar?
No way. It was the typical supercutre bar —even if it wasn't for me— where you could eat the best prawns in Palamós. I tell it because stories can save lives. I think of 13-year-old women in rural areas. It is necessary to tell them that there is more world.
She's an only child?
He did not give them life for more. My father, a self-taught from Lora del Río [Seville], became a very interesting being. My mother came from Caravaca de la Cruz, in Murcia, like many of her 13 siblings.
Did you like movies?
They did not consume. They were always working. From them I learned the demand with the quality of the food. It is the inheritance: if they had been climbers, they would have climbing shoes.
What else did you learn from them?
Too. My father was the president of my mother's fan club. She died saying: I love you, you are beautiful. And that is heavy metal . We smoked a joint on the terrace and he said to me: "I would die without this woman." And I: "Yes, but you spend a lot with me." And he: “Behave badly that I will stay with her. She is my life plan ”. There are uncles who are ground gold. And the Peña was.
They were more of a couple than parents.
Absolutely. As a child you know that you are on another level and as a couple reference you have the unattainable. When my father died, I discovered my mother. And ... I made the mistake of telling the 40 things that I should have said with 15.
At least he said so.
But I said it wrong. Now I just want you to be happy. And love her.
Judge Montes is named after her. Have you gone from asking for a job to having your papers made to measure?
It is casual. There were many candidates to interpret it. I was not the first option. They don't like me to tell it, but that's the way it is.
In Rosa's Wedding, she plays a woman overwhelmed by what everyone expects from her, who decides to think of herself.
I will see it in Malaga when it opens. I have no vanity to see it alone on a computer. I enjoy being an instrument to tell someone else's story. It left my soul, but Iciar Bollain has to talk about the movie. She is very scissor. In the montage it cuts a lot. Oh, and they also tested many actresses to be Rosa.
Didn't he call you?
No way. I want to tell the 19-year-old actresses that I'm 46 and still doing castings . With Iciar I have worked and won awards and he also gave me tests for films for which he did not catch me. An actor lives with uncertainty.
Even with who knows her.
He doesn't know me. We did Hello, are you alone? 30 years ago. Neither she nor I are the same. Until this movie, she had a fantasy that she liked me as an actress. This time I have not felt it.
But he chose it!
I am working with the other. And in this film are Nathalie Poza, Sergi López, Ramón Barea and Paula Usero, whom I did not know and I wish life would give me daughters like her. She is smarter than hunger: she saw what I did not see.
Than?
Intimate things. I have the character that I have.
And the blind sometimes?
Well, like the song: I'm not going to apologize for feeling the way I feel. I want them to respect my way of life. I believe this.
Her character, Rosa, presses the nuclear button: she stops her life to think about her. Have you squeezed it?
When I was chosen I had not been able. But I was at a time when I needed to commit to myself and I squeezed it before I started.
What did?
With Rosa I have tried to build Sancho Panza, the eternal squire, a person who forgets himself. I got fat and I would have liked to do it more, but I'm not Robert De Niro. Where I did not get fat I got ugly. I bought the worst shampoo to break my hair. I go without makeup. She said to the makeup artist: "Don't worry, with acting I will beautify." Let's see, you are not going to see Amaia Salamanca, but the viewer had to see that the strength of having made that decision beautifies.
What button did you have to press?
Take charge of my life. I lose myself emotionally. I want to meet people who give me the value I have as a human being. The confinement here has been hard, but I have written a series that had been inside me for years: Puerto y Camino .
What is it about
In fiction it is difficult to find interesting women over 40. They tell us sad, boring or bitter. And we are happy and we fuck better because we have more experience, and we leave behind the anger of what we would like to be to accept what we are. I see series of young people targeting their thirties in which the problem is that they do not reach orgasm. A woman has to learn to say: higher, lower. They even carry our heads and we all know where the penis is. You have to count female sexuality. The series talks about the woman I would like to be. The news is that Isabel Coixet is going to produce it.
Why Coixet?
She and Rosa Maria Sardà have educated me. Rosa said: "Read this to yourself." Isabel makes you fly. She has trusted me to act, write and direct. I have wasted a lot of time in my life emotionally entangled. Now I am focused on work, on myself and on being happy.
As the protagonist.
Sometimes you fight to settle in unhappiness. La Sardà helped me see that this was not my nature, that I am a happy person.
Rosa's wedding talks about setting limits on others. Is the culture of effort self-exploitation?
I am self-demanding because my mother was. I have sucked him. But I have changed it thanks to watching people die and be born. I have learned the opposite: enjoy, celebrate. We live in the Christian culture of guilt, but there is no guilt, there is responsibility. I remember saying to my mother "I'm going to do this" and she answering "you will see", a phrase she hated. They never said to you: "Have a good time." I want to educate from the enjoyment, which then comes back.
How old is your son?
Eight.
Does your grandmother not say "you will see"?
No. I'm already there to stop it.
Why is he called Roman?
When I was little, Mr. Román, who ran a Central Bank branch in front of my parents' bar, helped me do my homework because they couldn't. He smoked a pipe and drank beer in a balloon glass.
Do you know that your son is called like him?
Did not die.
He is very loyal.
I am guided by emotions.
In the 2013 Goya speech, he asked for work to feed his son. Why do you think it surprised you so much?
Because it is more impudent to talk about money than about sex. In me it is a deformation because my parents have handled a lot.
Very much?
My mother has never entered a Zara. She is interested in carriages because she has had that prince charming ... She only reads Barbara Cartland, who I think has hurt her a lot, but she was the one who showed me who Valentino was.
She is very private for some matters, but she talked about masturbation on the show La resistance.
What do we have to think about? That only boys masturbate so they can sleep peacefully? It is important that the girls do not swallow that. I always saw my parents in balls. Maybe we have not been very educated or read —my father read Jiménez del Oso, not Capote—, but we have never hidden.
That you do not notice that we are wrong, that you do not notice that I have cancer, that you do not notice that I am gay ... Why do we show the opposite of what happens to us?
In the Coixet movie Yesterday never ends a character explains it: "People run away from other people's shit".
Are not the closest relationships established from vulnerability?
I am one of those who, if I am ill, prefer not to give the ember. What brings me closer to people is that they accept me as I am.
Are you keeping your child alone?
Yes.
In The Resistance, he said that he owes his mother money. Do you earn little even now that you work so much?
You create your own ballasts. You enroll your son in this school ... But I have already paid my mother.
What school do you go to?
I just don't want to say it. All I want is to be an actress. Do it very well so that they call me again. It doesn't work that way though. You can do it well and do not call you anymore. The dream of my life would be not to do press.
But here we are. He has accepted that we come to El Hierro and, not to like it, he has appeared in many programs.
It was important to tell a group of women: I, Candela Peña, am with you who have more than 40, who have children, who have left you lying, that you cannot fuck if it is not for Tinder, that they arrive at two in the morning and you want to see a chapter of a series and life doesn't give you.
She has become addicted to Resistance.
They told me: "Don't be funny." But I met David Broncano and connected. It catches me big, but it drives me crazy. The audience for the program is young. They started sending me private messages. Even with penises. David explained it to me: “They are not used to the truth being told on television. As you say, you connect ”. I do not have any syndrome of bienquedismo neither with my boss, nor with the shoemaker nor with Letizia, Felipe's wife.
In her novel Pérez Príncipe, María Dolores , she says that she wrote to Queen Sofía to offer herself as the wife of her son. Did you really like her?
I was 12 years old, but you can see how pretty. I had seen a lot of movies. Romantic comedy has hurt us all. What you ask of someone is not that he is a blue prince, but that he helps you manage your nonsense. Not?
Does anyone call her Pilar?
Well, in Gavà I am the Pili of Frankfurt. For the rest I am Candela since I went to the school of Nancy Tuñón when I was 16 years old. I lied to get in.
You have worked with Imanol Uribe, Pedro Almodóvar, Cesc Gay ... What have you learned from them?
Of some, things that I would not like to do, and of others, things that I would like to become.
Shall we specify?
I don't want to be a person who is not happy about the good that happens to others. Not someone unable to cope with a conflict, which drains the bundle. Many, like Almodóvar, I admire. But deeply, only to Coixet. If his career were that of a man ... He is the only one who has made films interchangeably in the United States, Japan, England ... Life is sought. He writes spectacularly, he has an enormous sense of aesthetics. You see it with the camera and you fall. You can not have more pleasure to buy glasses or bags. It is exquisite in everything. She can't have a better mother, more wonderful daughter, or brighter boyfriend ... Everything about her is out of the ordinary. It is the way to go.
He also loves Jordi Mollà.
The illusion of his life is to live in a big house, each one on his side, with a common kitchen and for me to call him: "Get off, I've made guacamole!" We tell each other our shit and go back to our things. Jordi has a bad reputation because very few people find him interesting. And he's right, there are few fascinating people, but others we hide. People are neither brilliant nor good, now: we all give ourselves pretensions ...
Are the actors prejudged by the physique?
I dont know. I told Penelope that I would love to have her physique for three months. Let's see what happened. I would trade having the most beautiful face in Spanish cinema for my three Goya, but not for my brain.
Have you been able to tame your physique more than your psyche?
The body adapted it to the stories that I have to tell. Taming the head is more difficult, but I don't want you to tame me. I am a runaway foal, but I want to run wild alone.
She declares herself more egalitarian than feminist.
Why do I have to take on a set of ideas en bloc? All I ask is to be free. And let it breathe. I have friends of all kinds. Only with respect we go everywhere.
For his son he wants a private school and neighborhood life.
I didn't want a private school. But the Wert law caught me and I didn't want a mass school. Does Shakespeare's speech better than I do. That's why I asked my mother for the money. But of course, you stay without working and how you pay for it. Now she is happy in that school. And I threaten him that I'll get him out if he misbehaves. So she is probably a bad mother.
Do you have a mortgage?
Fernando Fernán Gómez wanted a house with columns. And I always wanted to have a pool. Where the land is cheaper, there I will make it. I am ambitious to have inside. Now I want to continue writing stories.
What remains to be done in the cinema?
Show how women and men are growing. Pieles , by Eduardo Casanova, begins with a 70-year-old woman naked. When I saw her with the pink clasp, I thought: what a beautiful body. The kids have not seen that in their life. We need to install ourselves in the joy of living. —Eps