Susi Sánchez: “I am a young woman with wrinkles”

She meets us at noon at a friend's house where she is staying these days.

I arrive conditioned, I admit it.

I just saw her movie,

, on my work computer, I had to go to the bathroom to cry, and I still have Begoña's gaze fixed on my soul, her character as a devoted Basque mother, wife and grandmother.

Perhaps for this reason, the ultramodern and very simple aspect of her interpreter shocks me even more, who yesterday was elected vice president of the Film Academy.

Tall, slim, without a drop of makeup, elegant from the inside out in jeans and a baggy shirt, Susi Sánchez shines without meaning to.

Just like on stage.

His duel of looks with his daughter and her husband in the cinema is impressive.

How can she say so quietly?

Well, I'm an actress.

That is given to you by listening to the other and the assumption of the character's history.

The eyes in cinema don't lie, but I also tell you that it was very hard for me not to hug Laia Costa and Ramón Barea, the actors who play them.

It was very difficult for me to understand Begoña.

I was even preparing it with the actress Elena Irureta, who is also Basque, and could have it closer.

It was difficult for me to understand how difficult it is for that woman to recognize love, affections, dare to express them and surrender to them.

In the film, Begoña endures what is written and what is not written by her daughter.

Unfortunately, in the patriarchal culture of this country, women put up with too much without even being aware of it.

And they put the last ones on their priority list.

Have you also endured yours?

Sometimes yes.

In the emotional field.

But there is a moment when you say no, not anymore.

It is a matter of personal survival.

How do you

You don't have to be a mother to feel it.

My mother taught my sister and me to care for being the women of the family.

I am a caring person for others.

And I also have my mother's reference.

In my house affections were not expressed much either.

They were a post-war generation, tough, dry, for whom the important thing was to raise their children.

The kisses, the hugs, I began to know when I left home, in other families.

It was when I was older that I understood my parents.

Her father, a military man, did not want her to be an actress.

But you say that her theater saved her life.

Yes. That and, later, the therapy.

I have had to do intense personal work because, if not, I thought I would go crazy.

Life is entering the social convention, and I did not understand it.

As a child I thought I could never be like adults.

And, to this day, it still happens to me a little.

I don't fit or want to fit into that mold.

I continue with a lot of resistance to enter that drawer.

Everything is stipulated so that you cannot get out of that way of functioning.

What things are you supposed to be, or do, that you don't want to?

I suppose that, from the outset, being homosexual in a patriarchal society is already an unchecking.

Not having children, too.

Motherhood is supposed to be wonderful, and it may not be.

That is disassembled in

.

But, I don't know, it's something more general.

We live in a very crazy world and we are convinced that this is life.

Consumption, capitalism, not stopping, having to produce, get, win.

I rebel.

Have you managed to be free?

I have tried, at least, because I felt I had no choice.

If not, he couldn't live.

I could not have lived a life like mine without a minimum of freedom.

I read that he recently separated from his wife of decades.

How is she?

It is very difficult.

We broke up in December and after 30 years there is a very strong bond between us.

Couple love is not only sexual love.

Perhaps after 30 years, sexuality is not the fundamental component, but there is a depth in the affections.

I have a bond with Consuelo [actress and acting teacher Consuelo Trujillo, her ex-wife] and I will have it all my life.

How do you deal with loneliness?

Well, it is being very productive, because I have a lot of work and at this moment it is very good for me.

The truth is that I went through hell.

It cost me a lot and it was very hard, but I knew I had to go for it.

Now I feel pretty good.

When they ask me if I want another relationship, I say, look, I'm 67 years old, I've lived with a partner all my life.

What I want is to be calm.

It is said of you that you are a character actress.

What is that she?

To tell you the truth, I don't know what that means.

It seems that he is someone temperamental and it is true that they have almost always given me hard, contained roles.

But I have also almost always done what I wanted.

Or what I could, because, for example, at the time of the uncovering, I couldn't show my breasts, among other things because I didn't have breasts.

I was doing the things that I could and that I saw made sense to me.

With or without breasts, how do you see yourself in the mirror today?

I have never seen myself pretty, nor have I had a reputation for being so.

When I was little they called me 'horse face', and they

me , although it wasn't called that then.

That was part of a complicated childhood.

I lived it very intensely.

And yet, now everyone praises her beauty and elegance and kills herself for dressing her divine in the movies.

That's fashion, that roller coaster.

I was still born before my time, since she was a child she was much taller than the girls and boys of my generation.

Alejandro Amenábar rejected me for

because I was too tall.

Now it turns out that I'm special.

Sometimes you feel a bit like a victim of all that.

But I am the same person, and I hope to be the same as yesterday, tomorrow.

At 67, do you feel older?

In the mirror, and, above all, in the cinema I look old, with many wrinkles, but inside I still feel like a teenager because I continue to live things with the same passion.

So, it's hard to feel that you have the same capacity to absorb life as when you were young and see that you're not anymore.

I refuse to pigeonhole myself.

In this society I am an older person, an old person, if you want, fine, but I am, I feel, a young woman with wrinkles.

A young woman at her professional peak.

She was awarded the Goya for her first leading role [in Ramón Salazar

I feel weird, weird, weird.

Things are happening to me that I didn't expect.

What they call success, recognition... I hope I haven't become fashionable, because just as they go up fast, they go down.

I have always been a little ant, I have a slow but long journey, I would not want to enter into that formula and suddenly disappear from the map.

What I want is to continue in my line.

Giving myself to the characters and learning from them to understand myself.

This is my life.

As a child I thought I was weird.

I thought I was a little crazy because I didn't look anything like my friends.

Then I realized that she was an actress and didn't know it.

SUSI 'BLACKSTEALER' SÁNCHEZ

Asunción Sánchez Abellán (Valencia, 67 years old), Susi Sánchez for the world, has been stealing scenes and shots in theater, cinema and television for almost half a century since, at the age of 16, her brother, also an actor Ismael Abellán, already deceased, he took her as a listener to his university theater group.

Her father, a soldier, did not approve of her dedicating herself to acting, but Susi found in her the key she needed to understand a world in which she felt alienated.

She is highly appreciated by her colleagues -the Union of Actors has awarded her four times- she was not until 2019 her first leading role in cinema for

.

That night, she went to the red carpet, went to work at the theater, and returned in time to collect the trophy.

A lesbian with no wardrobe other than her own, she has declared that some director refused to work with her when she found out about her sexual condition.

In 'Cinco lobitos', the dazzling

debut by Alauda Ruiz de Azúa, she embodies a courageous mother and she stars in a very moving dramatic duel with Laia Costa and Ramón Barea.

Now she is involved in preparing a comedy of love and luxury with Hugo Silva and Elena Anaya for an audiovisual platform.

Lack they made her laugh, she admits. 

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