Belén Barenys (Barcelona, 23 years old) does not mind being
Googled
for being Rigoberta Bandini's showgirl cousin.
She is that girl with bicolor hair who turned the Benidorm Fest upside down and who has spent a good part of the tour accompanying her on stage, extremely pregnant and with her chest bare, screaming with
Ay, mamá
y
Perra
.
“I think that being the 'cousin of' has many advantages: I have more followers and people are coming to my music for being it,” she says, as she caresses her prominent belly two weeks after leaving the accounts.
Just arrived from the gynecologist, Memé, as she is artistically known, has been through an intense day of interviews presenting
Self
-Defense , the self-fiction series that Filmin premiered on November 29 with ten chapters in two batches and in which she stars and has co-created with Berta Prieto under directed by Miguel Ángel Blanca.
There, two women in their twenties who think they are smarter than the rest take drugs and party as a survival mechanism.
And there is nothing he likes to criticize the networks more than to see two impertinent girls doing and saying what they think.
Ask.
What's up with Meme?
Response.
When I was born, my brother Juanito was two years old and he didn't know how to say my name, he mixed it with “baby”.
So Memé stayed, which serves to distinguish me from my mother, who is also called Belén.
Q.
Were you always clear about being an artist?
R.
No, I've always liked it because in my family we sing a lot and I did contemporary dance as a child, but it was always like an extracurricular.
I got into Philosophy at the UB, but I left it in my second year.
Q.
What happened?
R.
I felt that I lacked contact with reality.
It's not that I was bad at it, I was the type to get good grades without being a bookworm.
But I discovered the world of theater and it fascinated me.
I enrolled in the Eolia school in Barcelona and also ended up leaving it because many artistic projects came up.
I haven't had time to continue studying.
Q.
_
Was it there that he met Berta Prieto, his ally with whom he created
Self
-Defense ?
R.
I met Berta through my cousin Paula (Rigoberta Bandini).
They were together in a play that Berta had written with Lola Rosales and that my cousin,
Chinabum
, was directing, and they needed a girl to sing and play live music.
Q.
And they already became inseparable.
R.
Yes, I became independent and moved with her to an apartment in Gràcia, which is where we recorded the series.
Barenys, two weeks away from her pregnancy, at the presentation of 'Self-Defense'.Albert Garcia
Q.
How much of Meme is in
Self
-Defense and how much is pure fiction?
A.
There is no character creation as such.
We have not considered making a distortion of ourselves.
Surely there are many things about me that are not reflected and others that are more parodied.
As a base, there is quite a bit of truth.
Q.
Your character says after a sexual encounter with a man who is practically twice her age: "I don't know if I want to do things for real or I want to be the craziest one."
Does she feel like that too?
A.
Totally.
That whole chapter was articulated from this feeling of needing to do crazy things that don't really feel good.
There I came from a very boiling moment in my life.
I also played to go to the extreme, to transgress everything.
I guess we're all like little kids sometimes, right?
Exploring and hurting ourselves all the time, but without being able to stop doing it.
Q.
You recorded that scene shortly after you became pregnant.
That was not foreseen in the script.
R.
No, in fact we had to shoot until November and we had to record everything in two months so that the pregnancy would not be noticed.
This series has been like filming about a very specific time in my life, it portrays the year before my pregnancy.
It's very strong, while I was shooting it I wasn't there anymore, you know?
I already felt like I was interpreting something that was suddenly falling away from me.
Q.
You don't want to go back there?
A.
No, it's not that.
I am learning a lot from this imposed calm, but at the same time I also miss all that madness a lot.
They are being two super different lives, that does not mean that I have felt the mourning for losing that.
Barenys with the co-creator and co-star of 'Self-Defense', Berta Prieto, in a promotional image for the series. Kiku Piñol
Q.
Your character recounts a sexual experience that caused a panic attack and took her to the emergency room.
Do we need to talk better about sex and without generating so many expectations?
R.
Yes, a lot, because it's like we never matured with this.
In one of the chapters there is a phrase that a character says and to which I always return: "None of my friends have a normal relationship with sex or with men."
I've been thinking about it a lot lately.
Everything is very complicated, and it is very complicated to relate to sex, especially with men.
Q.
It is always attributed to the fact that the consumption of porn has greatly affected this era.
Do you think so too?
R.
I think the problem we have is desire.
That is the hardest.
Knowing what you really want, if it is genuine or if it is conditioned by the expectations of the other.
Regarding porn, in my case I haven't consumed much, but I don't know to what extent my boyfriends' desire was conditioned by the porn they watched, and so I had to adapt to that desire or that relationship they had with porn. .
Q.
There is a moment in which your character calls an ex, who is a writer, to tell him that he was lying to him and that he actually believes that he is a lousy author.
Is she sick of pleasing men?
A.
That scene is one hundred percent biographical, but not because I think all my exes are bad writers.
Berta and I laughed a lot about that, that I always end up praising my boyfriends a lot.
I always end up telling them how much I admire them, like I idealize them without being asked.
Actually, I should ask myself if what they do seems really that good to me.
Barenys, in a promotional image of 'Self-Defense'. Kiku Piñol
Q.
In the series it is not known what they live on or how they pay their rent.
Don't you care about money?
R.
Yes, especially now that I am going to be a mother.
Before, it didn't matter so much to me, but it's just that I became independent relatively recently and until then, my relationship with money wasn't so necessary either.
I have always been lucky to have jobs and have been able to support myself.
Q.
What scares you the most right now?
R.
With motherhood, for the first time I have stopped in my life.
I left many songs written before being a mother that I want to recover.
I am concerned about how I am going to start it and integrate it into my life as an artist.
Q.
In
Self
-Defense they believe that being a basic girl is the worst, why?
R.
It is my biggest nightmare.
It happens to me with clothes, I always need fun, colored clothes.
I guess with so many possibilities to represent you, why would you choose to try to copy everyone?
I find it much more fun to ride your roll.
That and that there is simply a desire to attract attention.
Barenys, at the Benidorm Fest acting as a chorus girl for Rigoberta Bandini. RTVE (RTVE/EFE)
Q.
In this series, people take drugs a lot, out of anxiety and evasion.
By presenting it to the press, they have defended the right to see women on screen taking drugs without having to have a trauma to justify it.
R.
I am surprised by the hypocrisy with drugs.
I don't understand why everyone is so scandalized if later you go to a party and more than half of the people are taking drugs.
Being a woman, moreover, is much more stigmatized.
If even I have had prejudices.
Q.
When and why did you have them?
R.
It happened to me on the penultimate outing I had before I got pregnant.
I ended up in an
after
-party and had a deep conversation with a woman who was doing coke and she told me that she was a mother and that she had just gotten divorced.
I really surprised myself because I unintentionally judged her.
I immediately corrected myself, but I know that I would never have thought of this of a man, that moral judgment, if I had seen a father taking drugs.
Q.
Your character talks a lot about religion, both about the Bible and the influence it has had on your life.
What does that dregs come from?
R.
I have the logo tattooed with the initials of my school on my arm.
From the age of 3 to 18 I went to Las Teresianas (a private center in the upper area of Barcelona, a neo-Gothic building by Antoni Gaudí) and I had a very big rebound when I left there.
I got very angry with religion.
I suppose that over the years it is something that I have ended up integrating, although at the same time I deny it a lot.
If I embrace it in a certain way it is because it is part of my past.
That doesn't mean that I still have a lot of conflicts with retrograde people, that's something I don't share.
I would never take my daughter to Teresianas.
Q.
What are you most proud of in this series?
R.
_
That in the last episode we deal with the silence about the abuses in Spanish cinema.
Q.
Do you give real names?
R.
No, but people in the industry who know about it will recognize it for sure.
Many faces of shame will fall.
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