– The new Movistar Plus+ series addresses senile dementia from “the fear” of those who suffer from it and without “recreating in the pain”
This Thursday, June 6, Movistar Plus+ premieres ‘Second Death’ his new original series starring Georgina Amorós (‘Elite’) y Karra Elejalde (‘While the war lasts’) and created by Agustín Martínez (‘The hunt’). It is an “atypical rural thriller” set in the impressive landscapes of Cantabria in which the appearance of the corpse of a woman who was already buried several years ago uncovers a tangle of secrets and lies between neighbors, friends and family marked by illness and loss.
“It is a rural thriller, but not because it is rural is it atypical, but rather atypical because it delves into feelings, emotions.“, says Elejalde in an interview with Europa Press. And the heart of the story, the driving force of it, is the difficult relationship of Sandra (Amorós), a police assistant with a photographic memory who left her job eight years ago. lucrative position in a multinational to return to his town with his son and take care of his sick mother, and his father, Tello, a veteran UCO agent nicknamed ‘The Mountain’ who is a legend in the force and who begins to suffer from dementia.
“They both have a story from the past that has marked them a lot and in Sandra, my character, there is a lot of resentment.. Furthermore, he also has a fascinating mind where he remembers absolutely everything and that also works against him in this case. It’s a gift and a curse“, explains Amorós, who explains how, from those very distant places, father and daughter will try to get closer but each one from their own trench.
“‘Second death’ could be considered the story of a hug because the mystery that arises is so important, what happened to that woman and why she appears dead for the second time, as the relationship between Tello and Sandra,” explains its creator, Agustín Martínez, who assures that this is a “a drama built with the resources and twists of the thriller”.
“It’s like a chess game, each scene is so well written that it ends with a check, either from her to me or from me to her.. They are all reproaches, coldness and resentment in a kind of chess game in which we see who does the most damage to whom by reproaching them for that,” adds the actor.
The winner of two Goya awards explains that for reflect the dementia of his character at different levels, agreed with the directors of the series a “numeric code from one to five” to apply a lower or higher grade of this terrible disease in each sequence. It was a tool, he assures, necessary “to make a season meaningful and coherent” when it came to reflecting Tello’s evolution since, as is usual in all productions, ‘Second Death’ was not filmed in chronological order.
“Furthermore, these are diseases that are not degenerative in a linear progressive manner, they have ups and downs, and that was a way we had to see what state of dementia I had because maybe in sequence 17 you have grade 3, but in sequence 42 you have grade 0,” explains the actor who experienced a case as close as that of his mother precisely. while filming the series.
“THE FEAR OF BEING DELETED”
Although, beyond adjusting the interpretation of ‘The Mountain’, the most important thing for both the actor and the directors and the creator of the series was not to fall into excess or caricature nor into morbidity and indulge in pain, but rather to reflect the illness from “absolute respect” and from the point of view of the person who is suffering from it and his tremendous “fear of being erased from his own existence.”
“The fact of losing your identity, your own memories, that is, what you have been, within your own existence, I think is something that has a lot of impact.. And there are sequences where Karra really moved us with that fear and her look in the mirror,” says Óscar Pedraza, who praises the “magnificent” work of Elejaldre, whose character, Tello, reacts to the illness from “denial and belligerence“.
In this sense, Alex Rodrigo, the other director of the series, highlights how the dementia of Elejalde’s character works “like a kind of countdown” in which “The key is not that you have to reach a kidnapped person because otherwise they will die, but to reconcile with myself and my daughter before losing my identity”. “We use that concept of thriller applied to drama and you find very interesting new things and different angles without falling into the stuffy or overly dramatic,” he points out.