It is not customary to interview the protagonists of a series after the premiere, but in the case of ‘The Snow Girl’ Cecilia Freire and Julián Villagrán did not participate in the promotion so as not to gut part of the plot. In fact, their characters don’t even appear in the trailer. For that very reason, If you have not seen the series, it is better that you do not continue reading the interview because there are spoilers. Cecilia Freire and Julián Villagrán receive us in a room in the offices of Netflix and they are exultant. It is not for less, because a little more than a week ago the premiere and the data, already from the first weekend, indicated that the series is being a success all over the world and, indeed, it has become the most watched non-English-language series in the world after its first week on the air. “We are experiencing it with great joy and with great pride,” Freire tells us. Julián Villagrán assures that it is very “gratifying to do work that is seen so much”. “That’s what we do it for,” he adds.
That the interpreters have remained hidden makes sense because their characters don’t appear until episode 5 when the plot of the series takes a turn and shows the disappearance of Amaia from the point of view of the kidnappers, her characters. Cecilia Freire and Julián Villagrán are Iris and Santiago, a married couple who cannot have children. She meets the lost Amaia and sees an opportunity to form the family she so desires. The chapter is really distressing and, from what they tell us, the filming was not easy either. “There were scenes that made me cry and I had to do them, they cut, I would cry for a while to let go of the bad vibes and come back, “explains the actress. Specifically, she tells us about a scene in which, to prevent the girl from making noise, she covers her mouth with a cushion and almost suffocated her: “It’s a scene that has to be done because it’s in a script but with a girl actress and being a mother, so I wonder how I grab it and it was like that, I rolled, they cut, I cried and I came back,” she adds.
For both of them, the characters come to them in a slightly unexpected way. In fact, Villagrán explains that he did several tests for the role of Amaia’s father. “The casting directors know me a lot, and I had also worked with the directors. I made ‘La Peste’ with David Ulloa and with Laura Albea as an assistant director I coincided in ‘Arde Madrid’. I suppose they didn’t see me for the father, but without casting or anything they saw me for Santiago,” he says. In the case of Freire, it all started in the theater with a rather powerful character that she played in a play: “David Ulloa went to see me and thought that he could engage with that more brutal side of Iris.” The actress points out that “curiously” her most contradictory roles “have been in theater and not in fiction”. Although that trend has begun to change with her latest roles in ‘The Longest Night’ and now in ‘The Snow Girl’. The fact is that when they told him that the filming would be in Malaga, Freire saw the transfer as very complicated due to her personal situation. “I went to do the test thinking that maybe I would not do it and when you go with that predisposition, you do the tests very relaxed.” And he adds that he also helped the work of the casting directors who “were 50% of the test”.
In the end, the challenge of making a character with as many lights and shadows as Iris’s was a boost for the actress. When asked if it is ungrateful to do ‘bad’, Freire says that “not at all”. “I love being hated, people have liked me for a long time,” he jokes. And as he says “Iris isn’t just a ruthless psycho, she has a reason.” “Her desire to be a mother stems from a very deep wound and an open wound, so there is something in her that is very tender, very desperate and very bright in her eagerness to want to start a family, to want to give her love to a girl or a boy. child”. The problem is that she takes her desire to her extreme and in that madness she is accompanied by Santiago (Julián Villagrán). The actor explains that their characters need each other because they come from a stormy past and broken families and the fact that they are alone in the world makes it easier to understand the way it all plays out. “In the end, we don’t want to judge the characters but try to justify their family situation to create that duality that allows the public to understand our characters in a certain way,” says Villagrán.
Almost all of its scenes take place in an isolated house that in the series is located in Malaga, but in reality it was in Toledo, and both agree that the strange energy of the place seemed to be consistent with the story. “It was a house that had a very strange energy, the team also had a very strange energy in those days. And the place was inhospitable, it was very cold in winter and terribly hot in summer. The house was one more character.” Cecilia Freire also wondered about the need to tell such a harsh story and she herself found the answer. “I think this type of work integrates darkness because it exists and we can’t live without it. We all have an Iris inside, it’s just that it’s negotiating with a bunch of other Iris,” she explains.
Preparing this type of characters is not easy and each one has its own method. Julián tells us that it helps him to see fiction that inspires him and helps him capture the atmosphere of the project, in this case he remembers that he was watching ‘Mare of Easttown’. He also appreciates when the locations force him to move out of his environment because in a way it makes it easier to stay on paper. For Freire, on the other hand, the stoppages that occurred in filming -due to jumps in time or changes in locations- suited him well. “Going home, to my house and touching land leaving Iris’s clothes in a lost town was therapeutic,” he says. Freire says that he likes to build his characters from animals and, certainly, Iris has much of the wounded animal and in her the most basic instincts emerge. She also tells me that he was inspired by someone real he doesn’t even want to name while the recorder is running, and the curious thing is that it coincides with the image that his character has inspired me.
