Sometimes, few happens. The character, sorry, the person to interview enters the interview and tells you things about his life without almost asking him. It happened with Nathalie Poza. And that, at the outset, the thing did not promise. Ligh Telling arrived at the site he proposed: the divine Bohemia – he already declared a statement of intentions -, a place at the same time bourgeois and alternative of the alternative and bourgeois, Madrid neighborhood of the Latin. He greeted, apologized, warm without exaggeration, for the delay and made himself available to the photographer. First, cautious; Then, delivered. To the point of barefing herself for the photo as her soul is naked her character of Blanche Dubois on the stage of A tram called desire. No makeup, like his Adela character in the series Ragean overflowing woman, dealing at the same time with the care of her sick mother and her own evils. I ask him the first thing I can.
How are you doing?
Well, I’m not bad, within what fits.
What fits?
Let’s see, being well is an obligation in these times. For how the world is and, well, my personal situation: I catch me with an age, I am 53 years old and I feel that I am in a change of stage. It happens to all of us, but when you are younger you are more unconscious. Over the years, you become aware. That gives me lucidity, sometimes lucidity scares me, because the world, as it is, I don’t like it. On the other hand, I love life. But reality is full of falsehood. For me, theater is where there is more truth. I believe that those of us who dedicate ourselves to this is because of a restlessness that makes everyday existence unbearable.
Somatizes that discomfort?
Well, I am privileged with first world problems, but it is true that what we live in, a live genocide, atrocities that we did not see before in such a brutal and obscene way, it affects me.
I planned to ask him about age and women, but you have started. Do you talk about menopause, of median age?
Of course, but goes further. There is something not debatable: the body changes you. I do not speak only of the obvious; Beauty, whatever. It is, above all, what happens to you: hormonally, sexually. Then, also, it depends on the day. Yesterday I was shorter, today I have another mood. For me, it is a job. I have to work hard. It has to do with picking up, sitting every day and seeing how you are, how do you want to introduce yourself to the world. I have a certain tendency to isolate myself and, at the same time, the more you are, you realize that you need the other. I dedicate myself to the theater for me, because I enjoy it, but above all to connect with the other and feel that I am part of it. That is why I am not afraid of the stage. It happened worse in periods before transplantation.
Transplant? Of the character?
Yes, I read in a book by Anne Greenberg that Isabel Coixet gave me on how the brain of the actors works that, during the creative process, when you stand up with the character, there is as a moment of rejection, such as there is a part of you that does not believe it. Until the transplant occurs, when you finally enter that wonderful game and the character inhabits you. That is why the stage is not afraid: because I don’t feel alone there. There are hundreds of people with you waiting for something to happen to them. I wish we could go outside and the same thing happened to us.
But you are a successful actress. He has been living from this for 30 years. He has two Goya at home.
I like you to remember me, because I forget. There is a healthy part, which is that every day is new. But sometimes … now I live alone, but when I lived as a couple, I had the Goya in the room precisely for that. My ex -partner told me: “So you remember that you do it well.”
Do you really forget?
Yes. Sometimes I punish myself, when I am in certain processes, and I like everything. I try not to bother anyone. Then, when I’m going to work, I try to be generous and cheerful.
In Rage and in A tram called desire, The criticisms have been good and the public applauds it standing. Doesn’t that convince that?
They have been two glorious works in my experience, and that feeling of doing something useful is important for me.
The Adela de Rage and the blanche of A tram ... They are two fragile women. How much do you look like you?
Adela is the Blanche Dubois of Usera. When they offered it to me, I was incubating the other, and I said, “hosts, they have a lot in common.” They have drunk one of the other. Both works put the fractured woman in the center. It is good about talking about empowerment as if it were an objective. Empowering is very complicated for normal women. Few are empowered.
You have to continue pulling the car.
Of course, we have to pull the car because, in addition, we are required much more than them. There is something fascinating in the texts of Rage y A tram …both written by men: to live, you have to take care of what you want, what you need, what you have to leave behind. That’s why I was talking about my own stage, when you asked me if I’m fine. Well, I have made decisions. And it costs a lot. Now that is my great word: decision.
He has talked about his rupture. How much does the duel hurt?
You have to sit with him. You have to retire. You have to sit with the pain that something produces, and cross it until it can be diluted. It is impossible to anesthetize what hurts. That leads us to evil, to be violent with the other. And I, after a stage of great duel, I have moments of great sadness, but at least I’m no longer violent.
Has it been?
In a way. Before, two years ago, he had attacks of rage, but to drool. But it is also the good thing about this trade, which we recognize very quickly in the body what happens to us and, when you recognize it, you can see what to do with that. And there began my decision making. That forced me to think what I want for me, that I had to release and accept. And that, yes, is to stay in a very uncomfortable place, very painful. But there is no other to pass by. Decisions are not always good for you or the other. And what may seem selfishness later becomes generosity.
I imagine that all that, then comes in the look of his characters.
I tell you an intimacy. I told a therapist of many years: how could it be that I was wrong so many times, I have stumbled on the same stone, that I have done so much damage? He replied: If you had not passed through there, you would not be the woman or the actress you are. And that must be hugged. In fact, I begin to get better with the woman I am.
To act well you have to have suffered?
Look, I don’t know. But the other day, they came to see me to the Luis Bermejo and Antonio de la Torre Theater, which we have grown together as actors and friends, and we laughed. “We hadn’t even smelled this.” And of course. With 22 years, what are you going to know what loneliness is, feminism, I didn’t even smelled. I have arrived late for many things, but life has brought me. He believed that it had nothing to do with Blanche, with that lady, with her fragility, with her eagerness to please others, with her need not to spend time. Lie. When I have removed the costumes we get to satisfy our false enemies and our false friends, there they were. The thing is: now, what? There is something abysmal and at the same time exciting, it gives vertigo.
He has come without makeup for a photo in the first plane. You have to have ovaries.
I feel better with this face than with the one at 20, also because then I looked at me in the mirror and hated me. I have suffered eating disorders and now I see TV photos or things and I give myself against the wall thinking: if I was not fat, if I was beautiful, if I had no problem, but what I saw was monstrous. It has cost me a lot to return to the body, return from my eating disorder.
Thanks for the trust.
I don’t care to verbalize it. I do not allow myself to enter certain dark mental tunnels. But for that you have to do daily practices. That is why I meditate: whoever wants to see meditation as a tranquilizer, no, for that it does not work. They are practices that serve to be in life, not to anesthetize. One does not meditate not to feel and not think and calm the mind. That is a asshole. One has to be in their center even in the middle of a fire to be able to turn it off.
Being respected, you are not a very popular actress. Decision or consequence?
It’s true. I have not structured a career, nor know what that is. In fact, sometimes, I wonder how I have got here. Honestly, I would like to work more. Make more cinema. But, well, blessed is work. The same is that I work in a particular way, but it is the only one I know. You have to be faithful to yourself and that is sometimes to pay the price of not being in the mainstream. I don’t complain.
Fury and desire
Nathalie Poza (Madrid, 53 years old) never wanted to be other than actress, although along the way she also studied ballet and piano. Daughter of a French mother -nicole, an eleventh octogenarian who came to pick her up to walk after this interview- and Spanish father, Poza is part since its inception of the animal artistic collective, where he met some of his best friends and colleagues ex officio. Regular presence in some of the emblematic and winner series of two Goya, one to the cast actress and another to the leading actress, Poza has been in the trade for more than 30 years and, even so, he says, he forgets that he knows how to do it. If you want to remember it, you can go see her on the theatrical tour of A tram called desire, which starts next weekend in Malaga or tune in the series Rage and HBO.