There are two turning points in an actor’s professional career that indicate that he is on the next step: starring in an overwhelmingly successful fiction or receiving a Goya. There is another complementary one that is usually coupled: becoming the claim of a high-end firm to be its ambassador. With the El vividor campaign, Jaime Lorente has two out of three. The protagonist of Cristo y Rey and Denver in Money Heist performed the song El chaval –yes, Jaime is also a singer– at the recent presentation of G’Vine by Jaime Lorente, his second collaboration with the premium brand of French gin and in which he himself has intervened hand in hand with the house distiller, Jean-Sébastien Robicquet.

Jaime Lorente (Murcia, 1991) has more than overcome the challenge of playing a character as controversial and sordid as the tamer Ángel Cristo. “In the construction of the character, I based myself little on his life and a lot on the script, to form an iconic and charismatic guy and then enter into the absolute tragedy that generated all those around him. I could say that it is the toughest shoot I’ve ever been on”. He explains to the actor that he always ends up finding a place where he can understand the character being brought to life. It was not the case. “There is a scene in which I am partying at night and the next day my daughter is going to pick up the remains of cocaine that I have left on the table. And I had just become a father and ufff… I had a very bad time, how can someone do that!”.

And that’s when the reserved actor opens up on the channel. Suddenly, in a natural way, he confesses how being a father – he was a father for the second time on May 2 – has changed his sensibility: “But a lot, to start crying over things I have never cried over. The day my parents came home to meet the boy, when he left I spent half an hour crying with emotion. And now that I have been a father for the second time, the process that I went through with my first daughter has been repeated. Suddenly I’m supersensitive and everything affects me much more. Now, every step I take in my life I think, ‘hey, there is someone who depends on me and is under my responsibility’. Children deserve to grow up in a healthy, happy environment and learn at home what is right and what is wrong.”

His role as Denver in Money Heist, the most watched non-English-language fiction in Netflix history, was the one that gave him a popularity that took him getting used to. A lot. “Fame has also hurt me a lot. I think it should be verbalized how difficult it is to manage this. I never wanted to go into acting for fame, recognition or money, ever. And suddenly La casa de papel made my life change without me wanting it. No one warned me that this could happen or how to manage it. And there came a time when I said, wow, I’m not happy!”

Lorente says that he even began to do therapy. “I have discussed this with my friends: that six years ago I was setting up stages in Portmán, a town in Murcia, charging 20 euros, I would stop to eat my sandwich… And while working at La casa I came to feel that I did not want to continue dedicating myself to this because he had stolen my life. The other day, my father reminded me of something I told him when I had my first daughter: that now everything I’ve achieved makes sense. I have the privilege of being able to give my children a good life.”

Jaime already remembers as an anecdote all the castings in which he was told that he had been close but… “I am very amused when they tell me ‘Jaime, you work a lot’, when in 90% of the castings that did not catch me they because I wasn’t handsome enough. And they told me so, huh?” But it is not unfair. She acknowledges that La casa de papel has given her the most important thing in her life: “I met my wife while filming this series, which has not only given me professional success but also her and from there, my children.”

After the disturbing feature film Tin