When an actor works in a successful production, they often think that the phone will always ring. He has received visibility in the industry, they recognize him on the street, acquaintances tell him about his promising future. But, as the sisters Mireia and Joana Vilapuig, aged 25 and 28, discovered, this upward professional inertia does not have to be true and, in their case, it led them to look in the mirror with an impossible level of demand for their age. “When you are such a young actress you have a distortion: at twenty you feel like you have failed because they are not calling you, and you live through suffering and anguish,” reveals Mireia, who was 10 years old when she filmed Herois de Pau Freixas and Albert Thorny. Joana, who had a brief role in the film, became famous soon after with the series Polseres vermelles, where she played a teenager with anorexia. And, aware that they had to change their minds and create their own opportunities if they did not come from third parties, they developed a television series. About themselves. It is Selftape, which arrives on Filmin this Tuesday with a first season of six episodes.
The plot is an exercise in autofiction. Mireia and Joana (the ones in the series) have a love-hate relationship after competing in the job market, having had different luck and suffering a loss in the family. “We wrote a pilot episode that went to waste because we started from fiction,” they reveal about the creation process, “but then we realized that if we wanted to talk about our lives, we had to speak from the truth.”
Once they had built the characters from their personalities and experiences, even naming them with their names, they dedicated themselves to fictionalizing, inventing, and altering. An advantage? They are well known enough that the public can recognize their faces and have seen their previous work, but not so well known that the viewer can tell what is real and what is fake.
For example, they say they have protected their family and social environment, without going into details, but at the same time they talk about how hard it is to write honestly. “When I was writing, I could tell when I got nervous,” says Joana, “and there were scenes that were hard for me to read, that touched me, and then I knew I was on the right track.” It should be noted that they had the help of the scriptwriters Carlos Robisco, Clara Esparrach and Ivan Mercadé, also an executive producer. “They took the most technical part, that Iván has written much more than us, he knows much more, and he contributed a lot at the structure level,” they explain, “and we contributed the most emotional part.”
The backbone of the work is universal: the relationship between two sisters. The particularity is that these are marked by early fame, the difficulties of managing comparisons and competition between them, and their relationship with interpretation. At the same time, from the screen, they denounce practices in the audiovisual world such as the “emotional terrorism†of certain directors, willing to squeeze their miseries to get certain interpretations out of them, or the lack of protection when shooting sex scenes.
“As women, we have felt very vulnerable filming sex scenes because you are young and it is very difficult to say what you don’t want to do in front of the director, in front of the whole team, with a timer and at a time when you may not have others. work on the tableâ€, says Joana, to which Mireia adds that, “in addition, sex is not just penetration and, if you don’t have protection and you have physical contact, you are having sexâ€. It seems crazy to them that, after being active for so long, they have worked for the first time with privacy coordinators in Selftape, where they had the security offered by LucÃa Delgado and Tábata Cerezo.
They do not hesitate to talk about their references when approaching the project, in which they even interspersed images from their childhood, home recordings and videos of their auditions. They mention I Could Destroy You by Michaela Coel, Frances Ha by Greta Gerwig and Noah Baumbach, Fleabag by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Young and promising by Siri Seljeseth or, although they hate to say it, Girls by Lena Dunham. “We are in love with Girls but whenever a series created by a woman appears, it is compared to Girls, which is from 2012, and it is impossible to do what Lena Dunham did, because it is spectacularâ€, they laugh.
Watching Selftape, one can question to what extent it is a farewell letter to the interpretation or, on the contrary, if it is a question of its reintroduction. “Perhaps people will see the series and they will not call us because they will think that they will cause us a trauma, that we do not want to work,” jokes Joana, who is clear that she wants to continue acting. Mireia goes further because, as she admits, she has always had many doubts about her job and says she has been on the point of giving it up “many times” due to insecurity and ghosts: “It has been a very long process but I have been able to fall in love with my work again from a more real place, from a more adult phase, and not see it from the memory of when I lived the filming of Herois, which was very coolâ€.
“Selftape is our farewell letter to a concrete way of doing things and to the way in which we position ourselves in the world as actressesâ€, they conclude. Ladies and gentlemen, the Vilapuig sisters have taken the reins.
