70 million tons of goods pass through the port of Barcelona every day and only 2% of the almost 6,000 daily containers received are inspected, making the Catalan capital one of the most important gateways to Europe in the drug trafficking business. These are data that serve as a starting point for Iron Hand, the new series produced by The Mediapro Studio that Netflix premieres today and which has an ambitious cast headed by Eduard Fernández, Chino Darín, Jaime Lorente, Natalia de Molina, Enric Auquer and Sergi López.
Lluís Quílez (Bajocero) directs this new fiction in which Fernández plays Joaquín Manchado, owner of the port’s main terminal that controls a good part of its traffic, both legal and illegal. “The protagonist’s initial monologue advances everything that will be addressed in the series: the family, which is the central vehicular theme, loyalty, betrayal, the lust for power, greed, ambition… And at the same time it serves to define what a criminal organization is and to describe its leader,” explains the director of the series to La Vanguardia.
This leader called Joaquín Manchado is played by Eduard Fernández, who defines his character as “someone who has had to work from below, who has some dealings in the port, who is always looking for who to trust and who not to trust, but who in reality “He doesn’t trust anyone, maybe only his daughter because he can’t trust his son and his brother, and he wants to keep the family together and have a legacy.”
Auquer plays his son Ricardo, “the missing and weakest link in the family, with a problem of pathological gambling that constantly goes back and forth between letting himself fall and feeling the complex of being a child not loved by his father and of loving demonstrate all the time that he is the man of the family and it can happen to him,” says the actor. Her sister Rocío is brought to life by De Molina, who says that her character tries to stay out of her father’s activities “although in the end, from the control tower of the port where she works, she also helps him until unexpected circumstances strike her. “They will lead you to think that you cannot continue looking the other way and that you have to intervene from your point of view.”
Rocío is married to Néstor, played by Jaime Lorente. “I am part of the family but not having blood ties seems to be an impediment for them to trust me,” reveals the actor. A long-time friend of the couple is Víctor, “a port crane driver who puts containers on and off ships and who in some way is part of this network but we will discover that he has other reasons for working there,” says Chino Darín, who gives it life.
Sergi López joins a very choral cast as Román, Manchado’s brother, “an endearing and sensitive man, with a strong complex with a brother who has a very powerful and sometimes emasculating personality, and whose great sense of family will lead him to give everything for her, regardless of whether it is legal or not.”
Filmed in real locations of the port, the series offers a vision normally inaccessible to the public. Fernández attests to this: “I was shocked when we entered the port and started driving kilometers, it is a city within another city.”
