Arts & Entertainment

Argentine actor Eduardo Blanco hails beauty, thrill of theater

By Concepcion M. Moreno

Buenos Aires, May 1 (EFE).- Argentine actor Eduardo Blanco achieved international fame with his unforgettable turn as a bogus priest in “El hijo de la novia” (Son of the Bride), a 2001 comedy-drama film directed by Juan Jose Campanella that earned an Oscar nomination in the Best Foreign Language Film category.

But although he has continued to enjoy success in movies and television for more than two decades in both Argentina and Spain, he said the theater still holds a special place in his heart.

The stage is “the only place” where actors communicate directly with the public, giving rise to “something magical,” the 65-year-old Buenos Aires native said in an interview with Efe at the recently inaugurated Politeama Theater, which Campanella erected during the pandemic on the former site of a like-named theater on Corrientes Street, Buenos Aires’ Broadway.

That characteristic has enabled the theater to “survive everything, now even the metaverse,” he joked.

Since the start of the year, Blanco and another giant of the Argentine stage, Luis Brandoni, have been giving performances at that venue of Campanella’s “Parque Lezama,” an adaptation of the 1980s Herb Gardner play “I’m Not Rappaport” that premiered in 2013 at Buenos Aires’ Teatro Liceo and tells of the unlikely friendship between two elderly men from different political backgrounds.

“It’s thrilling and beautiful because you don’t communicate the same way every day. You don’t and neither do the entire cast of actors who accompany you on stage. And the audience isn’t the same either. It’s magical,” said Blanco, who also starred in Campanella’s 2004 comedy-drama “Luna de Avellaneda” (Moon of Avellaneda).

The theater is a “place that allows you to experiment, find yourself, learn about your internal mechanisms,” the actor said, adding that in his role as Antonio Cardoso, an 80-something, nearly blind conformist, he has combined some elements of his late father’s Parkinson’s disease and his late grandfather’s voice.

Blanco, who began playing Cardoso at the age of 55, and Brandoni (in the role of Leon Schwartz) have given more than 1,000 performances of that play, which is set in a fictional park in which the two protagonists share a bench and unveil the many “layers of human emotions.”

“When the themes are universal, they have an impact no matter where you take them, and I think that’s the case with this work,” he said of the play’s success in both Spain and Argentina.

Blanco also defended his decision to navigate the different worlds of the stage, television and cinema.

“Why with so much variety out there do you have to choose just one? I choose all three. Depending on the stories and the characters they invite me to play in those stories, I may like one more than the other,” he said. EFE

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