by ukeleleboy
Source EMF
URL Link
Date May 16, 2009

“I’m not that guy!” Enrique Murciano does say.

The Cuban American star that consolidated his career in Hollywood in 2002 with ‘Without a Trace’ talks about the character he considers his best work until now. But it’s not the FBI special agent he plays at the TV-show from CBS.

“That guy”, the Iñigo from Máncora (2009), is a mixture of womanizer, unfaithful to his wife and Machiavellian guy in the worst meaning of the word; a character that when he’s not there on the screen, we wish his presence, because he’s the motor and essence of the drama. Máncora was released at International Film Festival of Miami this year and later was released in theatres from the south Florida . It’s release in DVD will come soon, so the ones who did miss the movie, will find out one of the best, less vain and more complete movies from 2009.

“I don’t have those demons or dark sides” Murciano enfatizes in the interview with El Nuevo Herald, about the complex and funny Iñigo.

“When I read the script, there weren’t those levels”, who would become one of the executive producers of the film directed by Peruvian Ricardo de Montreuil (La mujer de mi hermano, 2005) and played by Spanish Elsa Pataky and from Lima, Jason Day, explains. Iñigo was better the typical jealousy guy which wife maybe is being unfaithful with another guy, maybe not, and he’s living a sort of conflicts. I added layers to the character, gradually, to a point that I told myself: ‘Wow, this guy is becoming something dark’”.

Murciano clarifies that Iñigo, however, is not a bad guy like the villainous from comic books, confronting heros like Batman and Robin, but those guys ‘navigating’ through the society with that dark soul, with apparently very normal lives.



“They work, pick up their sons and daughters from school, but however, they have that ‘special characteristic’, he emphasize.

“It’s a character that people love” Murciano points, who observed the same connection between Iñigo and viewers when the film was released at Sundance Festival. “Why? He’s despicable”, he adds and laughs.

Curiously, even though Iñigo is the ‘bad guy’, his presence on the screen takes part of the new tendency we are observing from some time and had its major representation in a kind of climax with Meryl Streep in The wears Prada (2006): antagonists characters stealing the protagonism to the ‘good heroes’, because the way they are presented on the screen – like Murciano gets so brilliantly in Máncora- insinuates that every single person is result of circumstances, lot times out of his control, impacting his lives so deep that later show their charming evilly.

“Every single person has his/her dark side. Some of them don’t confront it, others denies that aspect of their personalities. It’s something to be shown, like a cancer or perversion. Some of them just explode. Like an actor was very exciting to find out that ‘dark side’ inside of me, like an opening wound til the way the blood flow away”, Murciano asserts.

The result is indeed the best performance of one of our pride people –Murciano was born in Miami on July, 9 (the date is wrong in the article), 1973- that at the moment he moved to Hollywood, he found things so disappointing that he almost refuses to his artistic wishes.

Ironically, he compares Iñigo with a ‘crust’ result of the life blows, the suffered pain when you try to make real a vocation and all you find on your way are obstacles, closed doors and thorns.

“I had to keep those all bad experiences in my mind, adding salt to them, until the Director shout ‘Action!’ and we got that performance.”, he asserts.

There’s a scene when Day’s character asks Iñigo where is he from, and he replies: ‘I’m a cungo: Cuban and gringo”, Murciano explains, adding it was an improvisation moment from him since ‘cungo’ doesn’t exist in the Real Spanish Academy ’s Dictionary’… yet.

- translated by ukeleleboy