Two very different worlds, that of television and that of a detoxification center, intersect in A New Dawn, the new series created, written and directed by José Corbacho that arrives on Atresplayer this Sunday. The protagonist of it is a brilliant Yolanda Ramos who, without abandoning her comedic vision, also faces a more dramatic register. She plays Candela Nieto, a famous actress and television personality who, due to her problems with alcohol and drugs, ends up in a detoxification center where she will discover the origin of her addictions and try to start again from scratch.
Corbacho returns to film a fiction very based on reality as he already did in Tapas. “Reality serves as inspiration for me,” he explains to La Vanguardia. In this case, visiting a relative in a detoxification center six years ago led him to think that “that reality allowed me to explain important topics such as addictions and the mental health that this can entail.” In parallel, the world of television that he knows so well, especially talent shows, “also allowed me to talk about other types of addictions such as to work, success, recognition and popularity.”
With all that, he was weaving this story that is based on reality but which, he affirms, has nothing to do with any specific person or event. “But it is true that by having created an environment in which Anne Igartiburu, La Terremoto de Alcorcón or I play ourselves and put a fictional character in the middle, viewers may think that we are explaining stories that I or Yolanda have seen out there. , but it’s not like that”. Corbacho especially likes this series “which goes through comedy but also drama and that is why he wanted to work with Yolanda, to visit areas that we had not done together before.”
Although Candela is obviously not Yolanda nor vice versa, the actress does confess to having something in common: “being long-suffering, vulnerability and often histrionics.” Corbacho advances that Candela, “like many people, is a character who lies because she needs love. “Those who dedicate themselves to comedy pay a very high price for always trying to create that laughter in others and leaving their own personal problems in the background.”
Yolanda adds to Corbacho’s words that this situation can be extended to anyone. “There is a fear in human beings of being expropriated of everything and of being taken out of the tribe. Many times we lie about whether we are well, for example, to enter that society where everything is going well and the brain ends up inflamed and when there is pressure here, there is addiction,” says the actress, who is working again with Corbacho 20. years after the successful Homo Zapping.
Once Corbacho convinced Yolanda to accept this role that required the most dramatic performance she had ever done, and following that fine line that sometimes separates reality from fiction, “I was rewriting Candela’s character based on Yolanda, I give her a daughter, a marriage that doesn’t work… and that means that we end up feeding off actress and character and that Yolanda ends up putting part of her life at the service of that fiction, without being her life.”
Does Corbacho want to send a message with A New Dawn? “This series goes a little beyond entertaining and having fun; We talk about deep topics like addictions and the bad times we all go through.” Corbacho claims to have learned in this life that “to maintain balance you have to value what you have and enjoy the present.” In that sense, Candela ends up discovering “that the past and the future do not matter, only the present with the people who love you and care about you.” And she concludes: “You have to stop thinking about living in other lives. Just live yours.”
By the way, do you admit to having any addiction? “To tobacco,” Yolanda responds. “To work,” he says.