“For me Red Queen is a love story of two characters who meet, who discover that they need each other and who will fall unconditionally in love without an erotic or romantic relationship during a criminal investigation.” This is how Victoria Luengo (Antidisturbios) sees her latest project that will be released this Thursday the 29th at Disney, the adaptation of the first installment of the successful trilogy by Juan Gómez-Jurado starring Antonia Scott, a woman who, with an IQ of 242, is officially the smartest person on Earth.
The series begins with the protagonist suffering from depression. “She has been locked up at home for three years when she receives a visit from a police officer, Jon Gutiérrez, who asks her to return to work for the Reina Roja organization [a secret and experimental police project] from which she left for personal reasons and throughout In the series she will go on a journey to basically forgive herself,” advances the Mallorcan actress who has recently shown her desire to leave behind the name by which she was known until now, Vicky.
Hovik Keuchkerian (Bogotá in Money Heist) plays Jon Gutiérrez, “a gay Basque national police officer who basically gets into trouble because he is a very upright guy and is attracted in a sick way to lost causes.” To get out of these problems, “my mentor asks me to help Antonia Scott and there begins the journey of these two beings who are so different and who resign themselves to putting up with each other in the beginning and so complementary and similar in the end.”
Both characters move away from the usual topics and clichés. “Beyond playing a character that is an intelligent girl who must investigate crimes, which could respond to a thriller that we have seen more times, Antonia Scott has characteristics that have allowed me to move away from the idea we have about very intelligent people” says the actress, who met and spoke with highly capable people “to really be faithful to how one lives in that situation and interpret it with respect.” For his part, the Spanish actor of Armenian origin affirms that although he took the novel as a starting point of reference, “from there I have created my character and I have given Jon my perception and my feelings.”
Both actors agree that the thriller component is not the most important thing about Red Queen. What’s more, Luengo affirms that she would never have labeled it a thriller: “It is a story that is not constantly dark and whose objective is not to highlight or influence the evil of human beings, although it is shown, but rather I see it as a “A specific case of criminal investigation that serves as a vehicle for these two characters to meet and a love story to occur.”
Along with Luengo and Keuchkerian, the cast includes names such as Andrea Trepat, Celia Freijeiro, Alex Brendemühl, Nacho Fresneda, Emma Suárez, José Ángel Egido and Eduardo Noriega. According to the author of the novels, Juan Gómez-Jurado, “the series is better than the novel” and he has highlighted that the great virtue of the series compared to the book lies in the passages set within Antonia’s complex mind that show the viewer “his brilliant deductive process and, also, his darkest inner demons.”
