Her little girl’s body contains an extraordinary woman, as if it were a little bottle of musk that, when uncovered, lets out all her concentrated essence, her animal power, her sensitive and wild look towards herself and towards the world in which she has had to live. , her inner beauty, her unfiltered word, her emotional intelligence, her social commitment, her passion, her irreverence, her real and everyday feminism, her talent and her very personal choices.

Laia Manzanares (Barcelona, ​​1994) is a spectacle in itself. She made her professional debut in 2014 at the Becket venue in Barcelona, ​​after training at the Col.legi del Teatre. She discovered herself before us in 2015 when she played the role of Oksana in the series Merli from TV3 and leaves us with our mouths open in the video clip The Less I Know The Better by the Australians Tame Impala.

Thanks to the short The earth calling Ana, by Fernando Bonelli, wins numerous awards. He has played leading and leading roles in series such as HACHE from Netflix, I am alive from TVE, Tomorrow from Moviestar+ or The longest night from Netflix, among others, and in films like Project time of Isabel Coixet, The kingdom of Rodrigo Sorogoyen, HAPPINESS of Violeta Salama either The unknown woman of Pablo Maquedapending release, and questfirst film of Antonina Obrador.

Currently he is happy to get on stage, on national tour with I will cut down men from the face of the earthand is very excitedly preparing a film whose title has not been revealed, which will begin filming in January 2023.

Her world spins relentlessly and she has no intention of getting off.

From what personal place does the need to dedicate yourself to art and specifically to interpretation arise in you? The vocation.

It comes from childhood, from a way of seeing the world and seeing that, through interpretation, this could be changed, a little. From that place of vulnerability that is childhood, I saw that in interpretation there is a force of change and regeneration that made me think: this is where I have to go, to heal.

Seeing that the world is a hostile place when you have no tools or any power to change things, I felt that this power that I did not have, to make my own decisions and to live in a world that I liked, did happen and could happen to me. me, through interpretation.

How do you think the world looks at you? Does the image that others have of you come close to or contradict what you recognize as your own?

Ufff… what a fear… I don’t know what image I give exactly, but a long time ago I made the decision to worry about who I really am and not about what I seem to be, that is, to show myself as I am. I put more effort into being who I want to be than into proving anything.

Do you think that certain personality traits of Oksana, her character in the series Merli, free, strong and rebellious, have remained the “hallmark” of Laia’s identity? Has this character influenced the rest of her career, for better or worse?

The Serie Merli It served as a springboard for many people in the profession to know that I exist as an actress; The public continues to ask me about her, I think I did a type of work that, at the time, marked our generation, a new product, of young people talking about philosophy. It is clear that I imprint my own things on the characters, but I am not my characters all the time.

Have the characters you have built transformed you as a person?

I think the beauty of this profession is getting into a thousand lives to discover a thousand ways of living. I contribute my own things and all the characters contribute their things to me. But the same thing happens with the people I meet in life, if there is something I can learn from the people around me, how they are, how they manage situations… I’ll take it, I’m a very sponge in that sense.

“For me, nature is God, in the sense that life, the world around us, is nature, it creates and destroys everything”

There is another character, Ana in The earth calling Anawhich especially catches him…

In that short film and in that character there was something that, in this profession, obsesses us, matters a lot to us: communication. My character, deaf and mute due to an accident, forced me to learn to sign, I discovered another channel of communication that has more to do with listening to the body and not so much with the word, which is fortunate and a trap that we have, because the word can deceive but the eyes never lie.

Transmitting without my voice but with my whole body, with my face, my hands, my eyes, made me feel like my insides were talking, not my brain, almost like a baby, and that fascinated me.

To what extent, works from your beginnings such as the music video The Less I Know The Betterwhich he recorded when he was barely 20 years old, have influenced the sexualization of his image?

At the beginning of my career, I was the first to self-sexualize, due to that education that says: you will be your best worst enemy, so no one can tell me anything about myself, worse than what I have already told myself. I have said my worst words to myself, because I have been a perfect victim of capitalism, and that is something I have been working a lot on, for example, I find it more and more urgent to wear tight clothes, to look sexy… because It bothers me that they see me only as something fuckable.

While making the video clip, I saw what you mentioned, but I turned it around and thought: she’s a chick who wants to get her pussy eaten and then go jump with the gorillas, in nature. And she was also cool because, in reality, the sexual object was the boy and the monkey. For me, there was a connection with nature. I felt like… she is the one in charge, the one who says: I am sexual and I have desire and I enjoy it.

In your daily life, what does it mean to be a feminist?

For me, it means having a decent life. The other day, for example, I was walking down the street with some leggingsI passed in front of a bar and a man was looking at my pussy, less than a meter away, so I started to lower my head until he looked me in the eyes – which I placed at the level of my pussy – and I opened my eyes wide. eyes as if to say: hello, do you know that you are looking at a person and not a piece of meat?

It’s something I try to do a lot. I am not an object that you are going to look at, I am a person that you come across and if you need something, a handkerchief, fire, I am going to give it to you, but I am not going to give you meat, because if you try to see me as a piece of meat I am going to show you that I am a human being like you.

The amazing thing is that when you look into the eyes of someone like that, you see in their eyes the surprise of… oh, shit, he saw me, it wasn’t just a mannequin. I think that by doing these things, men are realizing that we are not here to walk around in front of their lives so that they have something to look at or a catalog to choose from. It’s about dignity.

Speaking of bodies, savagery and being natural, what relationship do you have, or would you like to have, with nature?

I am an urbanite through and through, I have almost idealized nature. For me, nature is God, in the sense that life, the world around us, is nature, it creates and destroys everything. I am happy on a mountain and in the sea, the only places where you really rest, close your eyes and don’t need to do anything more than the basic functions, eat, shit, sleep…

You travel, you change cities frequently for your work, what do you do to build your place in the world, your home, within a corner of yourself or in the middle of the planet?

This topic drives me a little crazy, I am a very homely person, I like to cook delicious food, have my things in their place. I’m learning that the house has to be you. You are the only thing you always have, wherever you go, and when you go to bed at night there is only you.

I like to know that I have an anchor point, to know that Barcelona is my home, to have a place to return to. I try to keep my little things nearby, a face soap, a suitcase, and with this I build a small home for myself and accept that I am here now.

On what issues do you connect and agree, or distance yourself, from people your age?

With my generation I think I connect, we connect, through the new vision and awareness we have of emotionality and mental health. We talk all the time about how you are, how you feel, many of us have gone through therapy at some point, there is something we have in common, the concern about healing emotional wounds, being well, not being resilient, not letting things pass but looking for new ones. shapes. There is a vital need to break with the coldness.

They call us the crystal generation, yet it is the generation boomer the one that is scandalized because we use inclusive language or because we say what we think or when we rebel against injustice or tell what bothers us. It’s not that I’m made of glass, it’s that I want a more just world.

“My profession is my way of life, so doing something that goes against what I believe breaks me and destroys me”

Is showing vulnerability revealing strength?

I believe that being vulnerable is one of the greatest strengths a human being can have. For me, seeing someone vulnerable is thinking: how strong you are for teaching that you can break at any moment even knowing that I can break you too. I prefer to be broken than to measure myself, censor myself and self-cancel myself.

That’s why we need to relate and create support networks, to have each other. Because we have had crisis after crisis, and what we have are garbage contracts and sky-high rents, and in the end, just like with feminism, what we want are decent lives.

In this sense, do you choose film, television or theater projects that defend or show themes and problems that connect with you or that you feel are your own?

My profession is my way of life, therefore, doing something that goes against what I believe in breaks me and destroys me, I hurt myself and it takes me a long time to recover; because this is not a job from which I can distance myself, do it without further ado and then go home calmly, but I have to internalize it, go through it for myself. If I can agree and be as close as possible to what the movie tells, much healthier for me.

What would you like to rescue or discard from these years dedicated to your professional career? What have you learned?

I have learned that there are things that remain and others that must be left behind. I have found my path, the place I want to occupy in the world, although that is an inner work that I am still doing, knowing how I want to occupy that place, that is why I look at myself with a magnifying glass and take a good look at where I am stepping.

I have had experiences that have taught me: no, it is not around here. That also shows you what types of paths make you happy and which ones don’t, what stories I can tell and which ones aren’t for me.

Have you learned to choose?

Yes, I think it is very important to make decisions, it determines you and in the long run it will pay off for you. Decide.

What is your choice of present?

I’m in the theater and on tour with a play, I will cut down men from the face of the earth, which is one of the best I have done in my life and with the best people I have met in the theater. A text by María Velasco that I feel was written for me but that talks about everyone’s pain, it is universal, it talks about living without love and with grief, about violence. This work is like a network.

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