Lola Dueñas (Madrid, 1971) has little to prove at this stage of her career. A two-time Goya Award winner for Best Actress for her roles in The Sea Inside (2004) by Alejandro Amenábar and for Volver (2006) by Pedro Almodóvar, she has once again garnered highly favorable reviews for her role in La bola negra, the film chosen to represent Spain in the Best International Feature Film category at the 99th Academy Awards.
After debuting with Veneno and the subsequent success of her role as Montse in the series La Mesías, the actress repeats for the third time under the direction of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi in a film where she plays Alberto’s mother, the character played by Carlos González. Lola Dueñas is Teresa in the segment set in 2017, a complicated woman with a strong dramatic burden that grabs the viewer with her pain, her identity crisis, and her final reconciliation with life.
“I would keep filming with them for life. They have a very special way of shooting, they give you all the freedom in the world and at the same time it’s a lie, they are directing you like that, with freedom,” she said in an interview with the EFE Agency a few months before the film’s release. An opinion that has not changed now that La bola negra is the year’s big phenomenon at the box office and in cultural conversation.
“Besides the immense talent they possess, they also have a lot of heart and moreover, they are very smart. I can only say wonderful things about them. I think the heart occupies everything,” the actress said in a recent interview with El Español. ”The experience with them is very different from the moment you arrive on set; it’s a whole team working happily and with all the energy, giving their all, you walk in there. They do something different and new. I love my profession; I’ve liked it since I was little, and I’m a bit of a workaholic. But it’s true that with Los Javis you manage to enhance it.“
Lola Dueñas and Her Role in La bola negra
During the interview the actress was asked about her portrayal of “a hard, bitter and corrosive” mother and about the fiber she touched in herself to make it so true. Lola Dueñas credited the work as directors of Los Javis “for making you dive in to play at full throttle”, but added that her own experiences also played an important role. “For me, that mother is above all a abandoned child. I saw her as a person who is caught in a spiral of absolutely destructive addictions due to heartbreak and abandonment,” she said.
Lola Dueñas en La bola negra.
After confessing that she was terrified because Teresa bore too much resemblance to Montse from La Mesías, Lola Dueñas spoke of the horrors of the Civil War that La bola negra recounts. “I have lived them because I grew up with a great-aunt who was born in 1901 and who lived through the war. Her husband was shot and she was shaved and paraded through the villages simply for being the wife of a leftist man. I have always felt that injustice toward her, because she had done nothing.”
Looking ahead to the future of La bola negra, she noted that “it is the perfect movie to represent Spain, and I have every hope that [Los Javis] will return with their Oscar.” And she also delivered a message to viewers: “It is very important that young people see it, that all twenty-somethings go to the cinema and reflect.”
The Javis and Improvisation
Now already established as one of Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi’s favorite actresses, it is not surprising that the filmmakers grant her a certain margin for improvisation. This is exactly what happened in one of the most shocking scenes in La bola negra, when Teresa experiences an unexpected biological urgency. The cameras kept rolling as the actress channeled that need into a raw and authentic scene that matched the intensity of her character.
“That came about because I really had to pee, because I get nervous on set and I get very excited. I pee even when I don’t need to, and I’m constantly going to the bathroom. I pee and I come back and go again, and I don’t pee and I come back,” Lola Dueñas said in an interview with Kinótico. And she added that it was Javier Calvo himself who gave the green light: “When he gets like that, I like it a lot. And that’s what I did.”
