Leonor Lavado: "We are how we speak: the voice is our psychological DNA"

Leonor Lavado (Seville, 35 years old), the girl in the photo, is not, not yet, such a popular face to be recognized on the street.

So she arrives at the appointment at Casa Encendida, a cultural center in Madrid, and she seems like one of the young urbanites who pack the place on a Tuesday in the middle of the afternoon.

Tall, lanky, dark-haired with black eyes, extremely kind, her slight Sevillian accent disappears when she talks about the characters whose voices she imitates.

So, she is transmuted and not only she thinks she is listening to Isabel Díaz Ayuso, María Jesús Montero, Susanna Griso, Rocío Monasterio, Tamara Falcó or Carmen Lomana.

She thinks she's watching them.

The spell vanishes as soon as the actress returns to being hers, although she works and leaves you wanting to do an in-depth interview with each of her impersonators.

Let's start with the mimic.

Since he recorded a video with famous voices in 2014, while unemployed, he has not stopped working.

Did you find her site?

That video was my salvation.

She was 27 years old, she was unemployed as an actress, she had spent that summer working as a housekeeper in a

and, although I got paid and they treated me great, that helped me to know what I didn't want to do with my life.

Then I had a couple who was a scriptwriter and they said that I nailed people by imitating them.

I thought there were many imitators, but not imitators, and I saw a possibility.

I locked myself up at home for two months to study the characters, I took it as an opposition, I uploaded it to the internet, it went viral and they hired me, yes.

I am the daughter of YouTube [laughs].

Housekeeper to a British hussy at 27?

How exotic.

That is a movie.

My mother is an English teacher, I always had an ear for languages, and I applied to the offer.

My boss, a very pretty and rich aunt, chose me among many because I told her that she knew how to comb her hair and do her nails.

I was head of service in a mansion with 16 bedrooms, 15 bathrooms, and lots of people coming and going.

I had to have everything organized and impeccable.

And the truth is that I did.

They didn't want to let me go, but that wasn't my thing.

What a human observatory that had to be.

Yes, that helped me, apart from verifying that there are worlds in which the child's car breaks down and, instead of fixing it, they buy another one, to learn a lot about human nature.

I have always paid close attention to people, gestures, voices, nuances.

Behind each voice there is a very strong psychology.

We are how we speak.

The voice is our psychological DNA.

We can see everything.

It can also be set.

It is very difficult.

Emotion, nerves, age, tranquility, self-esteem, the desire to cry are revealed.

When I prepare the characters, I study their interviews, I internalize them.

I am a very spiritual person and I think that, in addition to the voice, which is something technical after all, it is about capturing the energy, the aura, the soul of the character.

When I study them, I consider it like having a date with them.

I put some of them in the first one.

With others, it is necessary to insist, until you eat them and make them yours.

And how do you digest them?

When do you give a new voice for valid?

Normally, I give it to a couple of friends who tell me the truth, although, intimately, there is a moment when you yourself say 'I have it'.

Sometimes I myself am amazed at how I nail them.

Who do you think nail better?

To Tamara Falcó, to Isabel Díaz Ayuso, to Susanna Griso, to Gloria Serra.

I close my eyes listening and I doubt if it's me or them themselves.

In fact, adopt their gestures.

Does she also do it on the radio, even if they don't see her?

Yes, it is part of the imitation.

Sometimes the gesture leads you to the voice, and sometimes it is the other way around.

You see this [rolls his eyes, shakes his head and twists his nose] and you're already in Belén Esteban mode, for example.

Or this [shakes her hair and chuckles] and you almost have Minister Montero.

Or this other [cranes her neck and raises her eyebrows a quarter] and you're almost Carmen Lomana, with that rennet and those eternal S's.

I cannot imitate without gestures.

It's like the character owns you.

Have you dropped any myths or created one by studying them?

I won't talk about the ones you drop.

Some

are exactly what they seem: nothing.

But, for example, Alaska fascinated me.

Because of my generation, I had a very stereotyped image of her, and I met a highly educated, highly intelligent, and highly interesting woman.

One good thing about this trade is that you never stop learning.

To imitate a character, you also have to know her story, and what she does every day.

For them to work, you have to update the speech.

It always alludes to the s's.

What does an E have that doesn't have an E?

It is that the esses portray us a lot.

You, for example, have very liquid S's.

Queen Letizia and her daughter Leonor, whom I am studying to incorporate them into the repertoire, have them very loud.

And Rocío Monasterio's eses, and

hers, are almost a genre in themselves, they give subliminal information: that she is thinking many more things than she says.

How is a PSOE policy similar to one of the PP or VOX?

In that, in the end, they have a very restrained, very institutional, very argumentative discourse.

So, too, getting their feet out of the pot is fun.

Like when I make [Isabel Díaz] Ayuso seem even cooler than she is

Why are there so few imitators?

I took advantage of the niche.

Now there are more imitators.

Some even copy one of my characters and visit my videos.

It doesn't bother me at all.

On the contrary, if someone imitates you, in the end, it is a compliment.

I have learned in life that I do not want to compete with anyone.

I feel I have a path, and I follow it.

It's like me with the characters.

If you imitate someone, it is because, in the end, there is a complicity with them, an admiration, even if you are aware of their weaknesses

And you, have you been bothered by any of your imitators?

I am a very white person and I don't like anyone getting hurt.

I renounce being biting too much.

That's my red line.

I don't want to hurt.

Laughing at flaws is very easy and maybe effective, but it doesn't pay off for me.

I know that there are those who have been annoyed that I imitate her, but they are people who do not have a sense of humor, or who do not know me.

Male impersonators imitate women.

If you imitated men you would double the repertoire.

I don't imitate men because one knows the throat they have and knows their instrument.

I can do from A to Z, but within my timbre.

Men who imitate women imitate them more than imitate them.

It's more of a parody than an imitation, which is great, but it's not what I do.

There are still plenty of great women to emulate.

And if not, she could always go back to

It's a plan B. In fact, I'm still in contact with the lady of the house.

But not.

I have always felt that I am the owner of my work.

I am my product and I dedicate myself to sowing.

If this runs out or you don't like it anymore, I would invent something else.

I have already said daughter of YouTube and social networks.

I would do another resume with something else.

Of self-esteem we are well served.

Look, right now I think I have it at an eight.

At other times I could have had it very low.

I am a person who has suffered.

Every six months there is a moment of crisis, this is a very unstable profession.

With maturity you learn that, more than self-esteem, you have to pull on self-love and move on, and I'm well served with that.

By the way, having been a housekeeper of a mansion, you will have your house very organized.

Quite the opposite.

At the housekeeper's house, general disaster.

HEARING, SMELLING, SIGHT, TASTE AND TOUCH

Leonor Lavado (Seville, 35 years old) always knew she wanted to be an actress.

Since she was little, with her dolls, with which she played until well into adolescence - "I changed the dolls for the boyfriend", she confesses, amused - she recreated voices and roles to mount her own films.

The daughter of language teachers, she studied two careers: Art History and Dramatic Art before launching into celebrity impersonation as a possible job opportunity, given the scarcity of female impersonators.

Her ease of hearing, her touch and empathy with the character, her vision and smell when choosing them and her taste for detail help her nail the voices of some of the most influential women in Spain in the show's comedian gathering.

, on Onda Cero.

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