The two dumbest guys in Spanish cinema take advantage of the fact that they are in Seville to go out for a drink. On a sunny and cold day at the end of January, the actors Luis Tosar and Luis Zahera meet again in the Andalusian capital to shoot the fourth commercial in Voll Damm’s Double or Nothing saga, The 5 Steps, which premiered yesterday.
They greet each other with the entire team led by the film director who directs them again, Alberto Rodríguez (Model 77); with the creative director Oriol Vidal; with the Catalan actor Artur Busquets, “the nephew”, who made himself known in the third ad… Good vibes in an industrial warehouse on the banks of the Guadalquivir.
“After three announcements there is a very beautiful complicity. We’ve made this a family thing. It is very emotional to get together from time to time and return to the story with the same characters, with the same idea, something that is not usual in advertising”, says Tosar during a break from filming. Dressed in black, as in all previous ads, this time they have designed a special ring with the beer logo.
Gallegos both and more or less from the same farm –Tosar is 51 years old; Zahera, 56- have been friends for almost 30 years. “We have known each other for a thousand years. The first thing we did together was called O Matachin, in 1996, something quite tremendous, a short film directed by Jorge Coira; That’s where it all started,” recalls Zahera.
Tosar’s memory goes back even further: “The first memory I have of Luis is in a theater in Santiago called Sala Lasa, where a kind of collective cabarets were set up once a month and we would go there … On one of those nights we met. He came to tell me that I had taken a piece of paper from him (he laughs). He approaches me and tells me: ‘You’re the one who’s going to do the show with the Marías (María Pujalte and María Bozas), you took the character from me, damn, I wanted to do that.’ And I remember that I thought: ‘who the hell is this?’ And someone told me his name was Castro”. Luis Castro would become Zahera years later, when his mother died and he wanted to pay tribute by adopting his last name.
Later they would coincide in a series on Galician television, Mareas Vivas, between 1998 and 2002. At that time the two Luises became very close friends. “For a few years we worked together and spent free time outside with our gang. We went out a lot, we went on excursions, trips, for about ten years we lived a permanent life all the time. Then we started to disperse, to have more of a career, more jobs abroad, we didn’t coincide so much anymore… Then I left, I started making movies abroad. And now we’ll see each other from Easter to bouquets. But there are things that are ingrained that remain over time: and you have the same empathy, the same complicity and tranquility when you get together. Tonight we are going to meet another friend of ours”.
Starting in the 2000s, they coincided in some films until the success of Cell 211 arrived in 2009. “The dodgy characters work very well for me and Luis; probably because we always do bad things with a certain sympathy, so to speak; The really bad guy is not funny to anyone. The character comes already made from the factory so that he pleases, so that the bad guy is attractive. No one really likes the bad guy”, acknowledges Tosar.
For her part, Zahera recalls a phrase by Alfred Hitchcock: a film is worth what its villain is worth: “Man, yes, the bad guys are cool, but I always play terrible, I would also like to make some love movie, snogging.” But for now, that has not been the case.
Zahera lives between Galicia – she is building a house on the island of Arousa – and Madrid. She has four older sisters and seven nephews who always ask her how many she is going to kill in her next project. He considers himself a privileged secondary with some difficulty in saying no. “They say that races are made by saying no, but I am not capable. I like everything, I see everything as its thing, I want to do everything. I keep saying yes to everything I can, only that I’m getting older and it’s getting harder for me”.
Now he is in the theater with his Chungo monologue; in Barcelona, ??every Sunday until the end of May. When she doesn’t work, she rests, practices a lot of sports and “I’m with my friends”. The last book she has read is Roberto Bolaño’s novel The Savage Detectives. “And now I am going to start with Pérez Reverte, who I have read very little about”.
Tosar is on another wave, that of reconciling professional projects with the upbringing of the two children he has with the actress María Luisa Mayol, León, 7 years old, and Luana, three and a half. “I try to balance everything I can, I have to say no to something because it is not viable, it involves a family sacrifice that I am not interested in assuming. We agree on everything at home, Lu and I talk about everything that we are both going to do, and we decide between the two of us. We try to ensure that the children lead as normal a life as possible and we try not to disturb their routines”.
In April, he will premiere the film Fatum, in which he precisely coincides with his wife playing a married couple. “At first we were very hesitant, but the story was very powerful. It was a very pleasant experience. We managed to discern very well what the characters in our life together were, we worked well together, and we had the added bonus of complicity”.
And after the break for the talk, Zahera puts on the patch over her eye, Tosar puts on his dark jacket and they prepare to mistreat waiters.
