Brays Efe (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, 34 years old) would have loved to work with Lina Morgan and see Chiquito de la Calzada live. “They are two people who haunt me because of how unique they were,” he says. He has a notebook with the 1,001 movies to see before he dies and he only has about 170 left, but he has been putting them off for about 10 years. “There must be a reason,” he adds with a laugh. Efe speaks in headlines and does not reject issues. He might as well talk about his love for auctions, sexist violence and humor as a traveling companion.
Ask. Tell me why we are here.
Answer. I have summoned you to the Spanish Theater because I am working on a play by Pablo Messiez called ‘People, Places and Things’, written by Duncan Macmilan. With a list of actors headed by Irene Escolar, but if you put it all together, you have already run out of space for the interview.
P. What person, place or thing are you?
R. I play Pastor, a worker at a detox clinic.
P. I have been told that he is addicted to things related to cinema.
R. I am a mythomaniac of objects. Not only because they belong to someone but because I am a person who keeps things. I like auctions and I have books that belonged to David Lynch and I recently bought something by Joan Rivers. I have several things about her because she is a character that has always made me laugh.
P. Are you one of those who believe that humor saves everything?
R. He is an excellent companion. Sometimes I have written tweets that have ended up in a place where they were not intended, because humor is context. That’s why I’m worried that Pablo Hasél is in jail. Living in a country where you can’t say exactly what you want in an artistic work worries me. I would like to make a joke about María Pombo, who is publicly exposed, without someone coming to tell me that by making a joke I am lynching someone or joining a hate campaign. It may not be your kind of joke and it may not be funny to you, but I want to be able to say it.
P. How did your acting get started?
R. There is a point of chance, although as I have always loved cinema, it is something that I have been in contact with since I was little. I once acted as a camera assistant, I directed a short film during my degree (I studied Audiovisual Communication), I liked to write… but I had never imagined myself acting. One of the first jobs I had was as a clown at communions, birthdays, which is not that far from acting, if you think about it. Logically, a fundamental experience was ‘Paquita Salas’.
P. How do you get along with Paquita?
R. What frustrates me the most is when they ask me when he is going to come back, because it is something that does not depend on me. I have always gotten along very well with Paquita Salas, and lately even better, because I live with her at a certain distance.
P. Recently, in an episode of the podcast ‘La cena de los idiotés’, she spoke about her childhood, marked by gender violence.
R. I remember very big arguments at all levels, from my father, but also from grandparents, uncles… and I think I have been able to understand them later, such as harassment situations. As time goes by, I feel more comfortable talking about this, with more confidence, because I am more aware of what I experienced.
P. You can now name things.
R. As a result of that program, a relative wrote to me and said: “How curious, I had not read that situation like that, and now I can see that it was true.” And we are talking about my father going to prison for gender violence. If as a family member you have seen what has happened and you can’t put a name to it… that only means that in all these years no one has talked about it in the family.
P. Before you go back to rehearsal, do you remember what you were doing when the Javis breakup was announced?
R. What day is that? Because I don’t remember, I swear. But I do remember what he was doing when they started dating, because he caught me at the El Nike bar in Chueca and they both told me about it.