In Privacy, the new spanish series Netflix, Itziar Ituno (Basauri, Vizcaya, 1974) plays Malen, a politician with serious options to occupy the mayor’s office of Bilbao. But the release of a sex tape of hers puts her career and her marriage in jeopardy. The actress who earned her first salary in an electrical appliance factory and who has a rock group in Basque knows well how her character feels. She remembers “the attack” that she suffered when she was the victim of a boycott on the networks when the series that gave her world fame premiered, The Money Heist. They criticized him for having participated in a video that called for the approach of ETA prisoners.
Do you think we have evolved when it comes to prosecuting the violation of privacy?
Technological development brings some improvement and, on the other hand, it leads to impunity, because anyone can attack another person, threaten them, destroy their lives, without anything happening. Little by little, measures will be found to avoid all this sinkhole that is, for example, Twitter, which has a good part of instant news and another poisonous part, where people download their worst facet. And the attacks on privacy in the networks of women are much more bloody. Some more, some less, we have all suffered it at some point.
So, do you understand well the ordeal your character is going through, Malen?
Yes, because it has touched me. I am a woman and I am Basque, and she has had to face powerful attacks. So I have taken a bit of Malen from my own experience.
It happened at the time of The Money Heist.
The series started with a boycott against me, something I want to forget but it’s there. They threatened me with impunity and I couldn’t do anything because people hide behind a pseudonym, insult you and harass you and there is no way to stop it. That’s why I understand Malen so well. It happens to her in her private and sexual sphere, but it is an attack on her person at work and in her family. It’s amazing that it’s something that happens every day. In that sense I think we have evolved little as a species.
“The attacks on women in the networks are more bloody”
In Privacy there are some scenes in Basque, something that we are not too used to in platform series.
It is not a series made in Basque, but there are some brushstrokes that bring you closer to the fact that it is set in Bilbao. At first there were no dialogues in Basque, but it was proposed, Netflix accepted, the screenwriter too, and there it is. It is testimonial, but it makes part of our history is there.
This series is his first big project after the boom of The Money Heist. Is Lisbon’s shadow, her character, elongated?
I’m getting quite diverse proposals and I’m trying to choose different things so as not to pigeonhole myself doing the same thing. Lisbon will always stay there, but I don’t think they are proposing more of the same.
But the success of the series at an international level will be opening many doors for him.
After The Money Heist I get very interesting projects. Not only cinema in the Basque Country and series like Privacybut also a film that I am currently shooting in Argentina, side thinking. It is the first film by a very young director, Mariano Hueter, in which I have a leading role with Alberto Amman, César Bordón and Mauricio Paniagua.
He shoots the film in Argentina, but he plays Spanish.
Yes, from a psychoanalyst. Imagine playing that character in Argentina, the Mecca of psychoanalysis! My character teaches at the university and, suddenly, three guys kidnap her to get information from her. She looks lost, she is beaten and abused, and she faces that violence with the only tool she has, which is psychology. She tries to get out of the hole by applying lateral thinking, which is the way to deal with problems in the most original way possible, the one that nobody expects.
“Basque is testimonial, but it means that part of our history is there”
Have you realized that in all your projects they make you suffer?
Quite a lot, and I don’t know why. But I have a proposal to shoot a comedy series in Chile in July.
I wouldn’t suffer so much mask singer France, where was one of the masked.
At first I thought I wouldn’t do it, but since I have a little rock band I jumped into the pool. It was funny because people have a very serious image of me and I’m not like that at all.
With his group he sings in Basque.
Things got out of hand as a result of The Money Heist, that people began to listen to us and ask us for records. We even went to sing in Brazil and people knew the lyrics! It was impressive.
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His beginnings in the working world are far removed from acting. They went to an appliance factory where his father worked.
In Fagore. I studied sociology and, having no chance to work as a sociologist, I ended up on an assembly line. It was killer, but it gives you an interesting vision of what the workplace is in another sense. It was hard work, but it gave me a lot as a person.