Mercedes Morán: “Acting makes me very happy, saves me and heals me”

Jose Luis Picon Málaga (Spain), 24 Mar “Acting makes me very happy, saves me and heals me”. This is how Argentinian actress Mercedes Morán sums up her passion for the craft, who receives recognition for her entire career this Thursday with the Retrospective Prize of the Spanish Film Festival in Malaga. On the occasion of this award, Morán takes a tour of her life and remembers how she married when she was only 17 years old and became a mother at 19, driven fundamentally “by an enormous hunger for independence”. “I married very young and in love, but what moved me was the hunger to take charge of my life, at a time when women, at least in my family, which was very conservative, couldn't even talk about going to live alone.” At that time he believed that his vocation was sociology, but curiously he has to thank the Argentine military for pushing him to interpret. “I had spent two years, the coup d'état took place and they emptied the content race. Now I can talk about it, but at the time it was very traumatic for me, because the future I longed for disintegrated, but it wasn't the worst thing that happened in the country in those years.” He believes that what unites Sociology and interpretation is “a rather obsessive observation of everyday human behavior.” “The best show is to sit on the sidewalk, watch people pass by and imagine behind everyone who happens what their life will be like according to their behavior. I am fascinated by how people behave when they don't know how they look. The look upon us changes us, not always for the better, and when we are not aware that we are being looked at something very genuine appears”. From her beginnings, when she was “a very shy girl”, she recalls that her first teacher showed her “that acting didn't have to do with being very outgoing”. Among her interpretations, she considers that there is “a before and after” of working with Lucrecia Martel, because she considers her “an artist, and when working with an artist there is a kind of whirlpool that is generated around her and that transports you”. For Morán, “total commitment and trust with the director is necessary, because there is no other way to work in the cinema, unlike theater, where although the role of the director is also very important, the role every night belongs to the actors, while the films belong to the directors”. He confesses his predilection for working with new directors, because it is “very nutritious to be in those experiences that are unrepeatable and there is something that happens only the first time”, so he establishes with those filmmakers without ties “without hierarchies of any kind” and he likes to “see how they grow”. He also reveals that he has “a special infatuation” for Latin American cinema, “because there is a very pure talent, and it is a small industry that comes out to compete with the big industry as equals”, despite the fact that they are films that unfortunately viewers “don't have as much access to because of their distribution in theatres”. He believes that, in recent years there have been “more female directors, who tell their dreams and their needs”, now the type of characters offered to actresses “moves from the prototype”, since there is also a need “for stories of more real women and less in male fantasy”. Regarding her television works, she admits that at the time of her first training as an actress “prestige was lost in television and acquired in the theater”, so she was “very afraid” of working in that medium and she resisted doing it because of a “prejudice”. But then he worked on “Gasoleros”, a “very successful” program that led him to “the most massive popularity” and with which he began “to break prejudice and fear of superfame”. Mercedes Morán shows herself as a woman committed to causes such as the claim of legal, safe and free abortion in Argentina. “I had to experience a lot of lack of freedom in my early youth, and when my country returned to democracy I thought that the best way to preserve freedom was to practice it. I do it out of a personal need, sometimes disobeying some advice from the industry, which tells you better than not. It's a desire to be myself. For others, I already have the characters, but in my personal life I don't have fun managing what I feel.” CHIEF jlp/fs/icn (photo)