In the life of every young actor, that day comes when, suddenly, the viewer sees that he has grown up, that he no longer sees him in a classroom. For those who know Adrian Grösser from his work in Merlí, this moment is possibly arriving with Sin huellas. In the Amazon Prime Video comedy, he plays Luis, the police officer investigating a murder case involving two cleaners who, while working in a mansion, find a dead body.
It was a type of role that the actor from Santa María de Palautordera awaited with open arms because, despite having made himself known with a teenage series, in reality they had always advised him to look for roles with a more adult profile: “I am a actor who works better playing a policeman or a doctor than a young man. Maybe it’s my way of being or maybe it’s because of my voice, but the point is that they’ve always told me.”
Grösser had auditioned for ¡García!, the previous series by Sara Antuña and Carlos de Pando, although they ultimately did not choose him. But, having been curious to work with him, they gave him this role of “a young policeman but in a position of power.” And, when interpreting it, he considered that the best way to approach it was “calmly” so that the character would work better when it became relevant in the middle of the season: “It’s a conscious decision, I didn’t want to go too far.”
De Sin huellas, which collects positive reviews for its balance between black comedy, thriller and action, believes that it is a “very fine, very well calibrated, very refined” series. He was struck, for example, by the fact that it is a work with layers on a social level and with diversity but without being the standard-bearer for anything, with Carolina Yuste and Camila Sodi as Desi and Cata, two women on the margins of society due to their status as gypsy woman and undocumented woman respectively. “The themes are present in the comedy but at no time are speeches given,” she points out.
His voice during the interview, indeed, has an unusual diction in a Spanish scene where it is often criticized that the actors need subtitles so that the dialogues can be understood. It is the same clarity that he exhibited in those beginnings of Merlí where, despite not having experience in front of the cameras, he showed charisma in abundance, allowing Marc Vilaseca to connect with the public.
The naturalness did not come from the factory: it was the consequence of working on acting since adolescence, not only with theater classes but preparing skits with their friends to experiment and make acquaintances laugh. When it was time to enroll for high school, he discovered that in Granollers there was an institute, Celestí Bellera, with a performing arts modality: “I love theater and television, I was a fan of Plats Bruts, I liked creativity and that high school It allowed me to rehearse up to eight hours a week.” For aspiring actors who are still in school, he recommends this route: “It helps you get in touch with everything that rehearsal involves and so you can finish seeing if acting is what interests you.”
Later, despite the fact that he had initially planned to enroll in the prestigious Barcelona Theater Institute, he changed his mind: “It wasn’t my path”. So he preferred to hire an acting coach with whom he worked with four other aspiring actors and, before shooting Merlí, he settled in Berlin for a while: “I had knowledge of German thanks to his family and it was an opportunity that I had to take advantage of and work on.” ”. There he left, in fact, with the role of Marc Vilaseca under his arm but who was in limbo due to the slow production mechanics of the CCMA.
Between the casting and filming of the project, so much time passed that he came to distrust that the adolescent drama created by Hector Lozano was ever going to be filmed. And there, in the abandoned institute near the Vall d’Hebron hospital and converted into a school for peripatetics, he tried to work with “a very well furnished head for my age”, he says, asking that these words not be interpreted as a lack of modesty. “In life it is important to know where you are going”, he reflects, “and from the beginning I knew that I was there because I liked the profession, that I was lucky”.
By this he means that “I tried to be aware, to take advantage of the experience, to do it well, to observe the crew and the actors around me, to learn from all of them”. It is clear to him that Merlí was a learning school in every way, including “the host” that he took after the end of the third season in 2018: “You go from being a little star from Catalonia to discovering that you are still a mindundi”.
He does not dislike the comparison with the triunfitos, the contestants of Operación Triunfo who, after their popularity, many of them discover that the music industry cannot absorb them all. “It was impossible for all of us to have the same level of success because ten actors came out at once, and you can’t help but compare yourself and think what the other one has that you don’t,” she recalls.
From there came professional colleagues such as David Solans (Les de l’hoquei), Elisabet Casanovas (La ruta), Albert Baró (Nacho) or Carlos Cuevas (Smiley) who was already known on the Catalan scene before the series thanks to Ventdelplà. And he, when going out into the open of the world of work, tried to put the experience in perspective: “I started working very early on an exceptional project. He told me that I had already done a lot, that they had seen me, and I continued to train ”.
From his words, it can be deduced that his professional and vital philosophy is based on two principles. The first is that he must never forget why he works in interpretation. “You shouldn’t be eaten by the bug of greed, of popularity,” he advises. The other is that he tries to understand that he is more than his profession or his filmography: “It is important to know who you are and, in my case, I like music, rehearsing, taking care of my plants, I have sold ceramics and now I also love working DJ’s”.
He does not say it like someone who is sitting idle or without projects on the agenda because he feels “very satisfied” with the course of his career. On the calendar, for example, the premiere of the second season of Bienvenidos a Eden, the most successful Spanish series on Netflix in 2022 and where, after having an anecdotal role in the first season, will now have more presence on the skin. of a hit man
Waiting to find out if Amazon will rule on the future of Sin huellas (which “hopefully it will renew for two seasons”), he performs at the Versus Glòries room in Barcelona alongside Jordi Banacolocha, who precisely has a brief role in his latest comedy television In the play Pazzo, with a text by Félix Herzog and directed by Roberto G. Alonso, she embarks on an intergenerational dialogue with the actor, whom he already admired for Plats Bruts, in the setting of an abandoned circus.
“He is a guy who has been on stage for more than 50 years. Sometimes it is convenient to have a person like that by your side, to be able to be inspired by him, ”he says about his partner with whom he carries the weight of the work. “I come from a generation with many actors, many actresses and great people and with a lot of desire, but you see Jordi on stage and he has the role of him integrated”.
He also acknowledges that after working on Joan Yago and David Selvas’s Romeu i Julieta, it was good for him to work in a less competitive environment. She doesn’t mean it in a negative sense. “It is normal that there is a certain competitiveness: we all want to work, be the best. This is so, ”he confesses about working with people from his farm. The key is “knowing how to manage this competitiveness and envy that arises so that they are healthy, so that they bring out the best in everyone”.
And, if one day acting projects stop coming to him on the table, he is convinced that he will create job offers himself. Now, for example, between theatrical and DJ gigs, he is waiting to get financing for a film that he has written with his brother and that he defines as a “supernatural comedy about the world of sects.” “It is not easy to convince someone to give you four million to produce a film”, especially in a conservative industry like the Spanish one where they “look at you strangely” when you present an original project, but he is confident that the project will go ahead. When it comes to betting, it is better not to do it against the boy with the well-furnished head.
