Even the sky begins as a social drama when Ángel (Miguel Herrán) looks from his neighborhood at the skyscrapers of Chamartín and exclaims: "Surely from there we look like ants." But it becomes a fast-paced action thriller (or what was formerly called an American) when Ángel uses organized crime to get to the top. "His ambition is excessive, he is not satisfied and he always wants more," explains the actor. “When he steals five million euros, the option to launder them and lose half is, in his head, a mediocre life. And he realizes that the sky has no limit. " The paper houseHe already glorified the rebellion of the poor who rob the rich not to bring down the system, but to place themselves on top of it, and Miguel Herrán has become famous (14 million people follow him on Instagram, the population of a medium-sized country) interpreting to ants with elephant puzzles. Rio in The Paper House got into a holdup for love, Christian in Elite got where it took for fame. But what does Miguel feel from up there? Among other things, envy of ants.
“I take money from Instagram, obviously, because you're an asshole if you don't take advantage of it. Right now, primetime television has fewer viewers than Ester Expósito's Instagram "
The history of its origins is too cinematic to be true and too crude to be invented. “I was the typical nini kid . I didn't want to work, I didn't want to study. So I would go out a lot, I would spend many nights outside with colleagues, and in one of those we ran into Dani [Guzmán, director of his debut A change for nothing]. He offered us the film and I told him he was doing it for free, my only motivation was to laugh and hesitate to the architect of There is no one here who lives at three in the morning. I did not know what a casting was and almost did not understand the word 'face-to-face', he recalls. At the first casting he appeared "with a peach" ("it was a dark room in a basement, I thought they were going to rape us"), at the second "smoked", at the third he did not go and in the room he appeared "in dubious manner". But since Guzmán kept giving him opportunities, Herrán decided to take something seriously for the first time in his life. The happy ending is that he ended up winning a Goya at age 19 (which he thanked Guzmán for: “You have given me a life, Daniel”) and signing for the two most famous Spanish series in the world.
Herrán has commented that he would like to tell his mother's life in a movie, because he admires her never throwing in the towel in front of a "very bastard, a real son of a bitch" son and in front of a town that repudiated her for being a single mother. “If I told you about the things I used to do, I wouldn't match you with the person I am now. I hated life, I hated the world. I had a way of being pretty bastard and at the moment I'm afraid to tell it, because I did things that I'm not proud of. I would get up, look at myself in the mirror and I didn't like what I was like, what I was doing, or how I treated people, or how I treated myself, ”he reveals. This self-destructive character, for which he confesses that he came to consider that if he were dead everything would improve, found in the interpretation a motivation to get out of bed in the morning. The thing about self-love, however, is still a work in progress: from not wanting to be present, Herrán has gone on to not knowing how to be present.
“It is very difficult for me to be here and now. I'm always thinking about what I'm going to do next, without enjoying the moment. I do a lot of things throughout the day and I'm not at any point. I want to be able to be in this interview without wondering what consequences my answers will have, "he admits," That's why I like extreme sports, because at those moments I feel alive. When I am descending a mountain with my bike or motorcycle I know that if I am not aware of the contact of the wheel with the ground, how I am going to fall or the suspension, I am going to put a host. And I do not want to get a shit. " That is already a step forward. The other pending issue for Miguel Herrán is managing the vigorexia that he suffered in adolescence, when his friends nicknamed him "Conan the Barbarian", and that he still haunts him when he looks in the wrong mirror.
"I have noticed that people think that my life is the cock, that I have fucked Ester Expósito and Úrsula Corberó, and that I cannot complain. The money has not made me happy, it has given me more worries"
"Every summer it is the talk with my colleagues: how is my body, if I am bigger or more defined. And I always tell them that the sad thing is that they, with their belly and their beers, are ten times happier with their bodies than I am, ”he laments. Sometimes you feel like you have lost muscle overnight. "It all depends on the head," he says. And of the light, of course. "And of the light! I didn't want to say it so as not to look like a geek, but I have mirrors in which I am prohibited from looking at myself with certain lights because I know that I'm going to obsess. It is a continuous obsession, because once you start you no longer stop. When I travel on a motorcycle I carry a suitcase with weights. And during the quarantine I bought a TRX, a bench and more weights. I gained five kilos of muscle, but at the end of the confinement I said 'to take it for the ass'. I have an obsession, but I'm not an asshole either. There have been times when I have not been able to control it. In La casa de papel there came a time when if I bent down, my jumpsuit would burst. They asked me to stop and I told them it was okay, but it didn't stop. When they told me that he was older, I replied that it was his perception ”, he confesses.
When the filming of Hasta el cielo was finished , Miguel stopped building muscle for the first time in a decade. Because your project of being at ease in your own skin is about making you stop caring so much about the approval of others. When last year he published a video on Instagram in which he was crying without saying a word, his fans insisted on rescuing him just as Tokyo rescued him in La casa de papel . Meanwhile, the media showed a concern that attracted as many clicks as speculation about his emotional state. As if it were necessary to speculate. He himself calmly tells it to anyone who wants to listen to him: “I wanted to show that when nobody sees me I have my problems, I have noticed that people think that my life is cock, that I have fucked Ester Expósito and Úrsula Corberó, and that I can't complain. Money has not made me happy, it has taken away a lot of happiness and has given me more worries than when I did not have it. It has made me more ambitious. Money has messed me up as a person. I don't appreciate it. In the rest I remain the same or worse ”, he clarifies.
Money also allows him to choose projects without pressure –doing things without pressure is what Miguel Herrán needs most right now–, which makes him feel lucky because he has seen other actors his age working in disgust because their families exploited them. "I take money from Instagram, obviously, because you're an asshole if you don't take advantage of it," he declares. “Right now, primetime television has fewer viewers than Ester Expósito's Instagram. Netflix gave us two iPhones and two cameras to create content during the filming [of Elite] . ” In one of his recent stories , Herrán recorded a paparazzo who was chasing him so he would know what it feels like.
This constant exposure is implicit in the public image of all the actors of his generation, although sometimes they get out of hand as on that occasion when Herrán had to interpret a scene with a partner who gave him the reply, outside of camera, while looking at the mobile. “It is a yoke that we put on ourselves, needing the acceptance of the more people the better. As I have had moments of becoming addicted and getting up badly if I did not have the likes I wanted to have, one day I picked up and said, with all the love of my heart: 'Come on and give it up your ass. My life is my life and I can't be trying to please everyone. It's not my job, I don't like it, I don't enjoy it ”. And, of course, one of the few things that Miguel Herrán is clear about is that what he wants most is to enjoy himself.
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