Pedro Alonso, Jaime Lorente, Alvaro Morte and Alex Pina on saying goodbye to the beloved Netflix series.
No matter how near the end sits in view, it can still be hard to see it. For Jaime Lorente, he finally caught a glimpse of it on the last day of filming the final part of La Casa de Papel. He was on set in the Bank of Spain, and he and the other members of La Banda were playing out the final sequences of a heist that started as a robbery and descended into an all-out war. They were exhausted, wrapping at around 4 am, which was normal for the show’s months-long production. There was blood on their jumpsuits, but you’d never know it. In between takes, Lorente looked down at that now-iconic red jumpsuit, and then looked around at the other actors that he’d become so close to over the last five years. He pulled at the crimson cloth that covered him, and, one by one, they all did the same. ‘We had been wearing these red jumpsuits for so long, and then in that moment we realized that it was the last time we would wear them”, Lorente tells Esquire Middle East.
Lorente never knew that a simple jumpsuit and a Salvador Dalí mask would end up meaning so much to him, nor did the rest of them. Five years earlier, it was simply the costume chosen for a new heist show that would premiere on Spain’s second-most popular TV station. It aired in 15 episodes from May to November of 2017, and it made some rumblings in Spain, but its resonance was supposed to stop there. “There was a feeling of emptiness when we concluded. We had come to tell the story of robbery and we did it. It was hugely stressful to write those 15 episodes, 70 minutes long each, and shoot them in 5-6 months. In the end, I had a certain feeling of relief because I had never written or shot so fast”, says the show’s creator Alex Pina. “We were very young, we had no money, and we had to shoot twice as many constant days, so while it was a relief to finish it, we felt that we had done something good. We felt it had contributed to the genre, blending the North American branch of the genre and the Anglo-Saxon literature of the perfect robbery, creating a hybrid with black comedy with romanticism, and then suddenly it was over”.
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It is often hard to say goodbye. For Lorente, he couldn’t bring himself to say it at all. “It’s something you just can’t do, right? It’s hard to even fathom of the implications of saying goodbye to something that is so big. Until you say goodbye, you don’t realize that there are some of your co-actors that you will never talk to again or maybe never see again. So, for me, it’s not really over until you say goodbye. That’s why I don’t plan to say it”, says Lorente. Whether or not he’s ready to let go, Lorente is ready to admit one thing—this show changed his life, as surely it changed many others. “On a personal level, on a professional level, my life is completely different now. And it’s all because of this show. I think that many of the things I do have been made possible by this show. I would have possibly had a much more normal life if it wasn’t for this. If you spend one day with me, you will realize how much this show has changed the person I am, for the better. I’m so grateful for what it has given me, and given all of us”.
Lorente is not ready to say goodbye. But perhaps, in its stead, he can muster one final refrain:
Bella, ciao.
Source : esquireme.com
