“Six in the morning is somewhat nocturnal, I find the same silence,” says journalist Valeria Vegas, who never drinks coffee, with intelligent irony. I find a lot of pleasure in pop icons”.

The reason for that fascination, a constant in your career? “Above all I like these women because They are above good and evil, live challenging society to analyze itself. There are people who are wonderful and are a raft of oil, but I am more attracted to these women. A Victoria Abril who has said her entire life whatever she wants and is unpredictable. I’m sorry, but some of today’s young actresses don’t fascinate me as much as Victoria Abril. I detest victimhood, I rarely exercise it and I have never made it a standard. I like women who are themselves at any price and who don’t conform to what others expect of them if they don’t like it and also don’t complain.”

“When I like something, I go for it. If someone likes stamps, I guess it’s the same, right?” he asks rhetorically. “I am a collector, fetishist and mythomaniac. For this type of projects that I am involved in, there is a lot of work that I hand over to the documentary filmmakers,” she explains, “I have been a press collector for years.”

His well-known book on The Poison, adapted into a successful series by Los Javis, “was conceived a long time ago, it took me years to write it. For a long time she would call me, and she would tell me ‘tell this or that or change that sentence.’ Veneno was someone I was passionate about, from his very countercultural place. I made a documentary about Susana Estrada last year, I dedicated a lot of time to it. I also recently directed a documentary about Nadiuska, El Enigma Nadiuska, about one of the highest-grossing actresses, who had a sad and very complicated future.”

Vocation for communication

Is your ability to communicate innate?

He must be and he has also been improving, because he was that person who, despite everything that was against him, had no problem getting up on the class platform.

How do you define yourself professionally?

What defines me most is that word, ‘communicator’. I remember that in my degree there were subjects that involved practical work and I loved the speaking ones and if not, what I like is to give voice, to script, to write a good sentence even if someone else says it later, I am also happy . I have been learning to communicate better with many incredible people, and I identify with that saying of ‘being a teacher and apprentice of everything’. I have learned from incredible women I have worked with, like Sonsoles Ónega and Toñi Moreno… who achieve something impossible.

What being does it refer to?

Look, if you see Toñi or Sonsoles live, you’ll be amazed by their ability to be aware of a thousand things at the same time. Or The Javis, who are great too.

How do you imagine your future?

Well, I’m not at all clear, to be honest, because the present disgusts me, everything is very polarized. And look, you have to put a quote on everything that has populism: families that divide and friends who stop talking to each other? Because they have a different opinion? It’s absurd, I don’t like controversy for its own sake.

Is that possible as a media communicator?

I think so. I am an anti-polemic communicator. And there is also the present of immediacy, something that I also express myself against…

The present of immediacy?

Life is filling up with Instagram stories and I think there are many people who are not knowing how to adapt to the speed of multi-screens… if this is the case now, what will it be like in ten years, our heads are going to explode. And I ask, weren’t the cars flying? Well no… they were the stories and personal data. I try to take care of my present on a personal and psychological level, to manage my future well. You have to be able to differentiate what is happiness and what is not.

What is your definition of happiness?

For me, happiness is in eating paella. From there you can only go up, when greater happiness arrives, well you have Disneyland! And so a bit with everything, I would like to be able to always enjoy what is important, which is your environment, in my case especially my husband and my family.

Are the networks the focus of the problem then?

It is not that either. It seems that we want to blame the networks from the present, and that is not the case, because of that same unreal physique and privileged lives that the networks show, our mothers felt bad about golden Hollywood, and advertising has always been like that, don’t you think?

The difference is that since everyone can now have their own cover, so to speak, the democratization of networks is causing us to believe ourselves to be more than we are. And we are not that much. Nowadays, many times actors or actresses are hired at the level of followers, but, when we know that followers can be bought, it is a bit bad. We should like someone because he is a great comedian, or because he sings great, not because he has a lot of followers, right?

Do you think we have definitely made progress on LGBT issues?

I think we have reached a moment in which we give too much opinion and what we need is to put ourselves in the place of others, in how the person next to us feels. We have been forgetting that the fact that a law goes ahead is more empathetic than something discordant. Equal marriage, when it was approved, raised blisters, but in the end we have gone from holding our hands to our heads because it was called marriage to accepting it and integrating it and nothing catastrophic has happened, on the contrary. Spain is…

What is our country like?

Look, there is a great song by Vainica Doble that says “two Spaniards, three opinions.” Things have to happen because the world moves forward: let’s not demonize or criticize every step. Individual freedom is for everything, but especially for not doing harm. There is a lot of misrepresentation about the Trans Law and we will see that it was nothing so terrible, just as nothing horrible was or happened with the law on divorce or equal marriage. But come on, we are a country in which we have advanced more socially than politically.

Do you like interviewing other people?

I have written many articles on Vanity Fair, for me the key to a good interview is that the interviewee is so comfortable that they forget that they are in an interview, that when leaving the meeting they say ‘why did I say this?’. Good chemistry arises more than it is sought, then there are characters who are very charismatic and others who are very short in words and very brief in real life.

What is your vision of love?

The important thing about people is to look them in the eyes, in the sense of looking beyond. And sentimental success is not about celebrating your silver wedding anniversary with a person you hate. There are people who spend forty years with a partner they can’t stand. I have friends who associate being single with failure, but it is usually a decision. There is always a hole for a hole, but if you don’t want it, you don’t have a partner. But sharing your life with someone is something very special, of course.

The poison… and the future

Of The Poison, he remembers a lot. “It impacted me and I especially remember one day when I was in front of an old romantic partner of his and he wanted to stand out in front of the other person and he asked me to talk about him. ‘You are the one who will defend me best,’ she told me. I was a little Sancho Panza of her.”

As a “social phenomenon, she was a very good thing. She had me as a squire, I was next to her all the time, and she said ‘tell them, tell them, explain to them what I was like, what I am’. She liked how he analyzed her.”

However, “I stay above all with something that cannot be learned, with his sense of humor and survival, he always had a joke in dramatic personal situations. She had grown strong since she was little, she was not a victim, on the contrary. She said ‘I am the most beautiful in Spain’, and used all her humor to face whatever came, she never drowned, even if she fell to the ground, she got up with a joke. “It was a good wooden ship of self-esteem.”

“A dream to fulfill?” he ends. “I would like to present a fun format, something with a touch of horror, a B series, something bordering on the cheap, a late night or something like that. I would also like to do many other things that I will never do, because I can’t sing, I’m arrhythmic and I don’t know how to cook, but hey, what?It’s not about being perfect, but about having a little laugh with life. and to do things that you like and that are useful for others too, right?”

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