La Reina del Sur star Cuca Escribano enjoyed the fall sunshine in Andalusia, Spain, and shared the pictures with her fans. Escribano, who plays Sheila on the show, posted a stunning picture of herself posing on the sand in a black and white bikini, ocean waves crashing in the background. “Autumn, why not? When everything is as it IS. When the cold and the heat, the sun and the rain ‘do well’ for you,” she captioned the post. Here’s what Escribano thinks about TV, Hollywood, and the future for women in film.
Escribano advises all actors to train in school, if only for the connections. “I think it is also important to enter a school, which in addition to giving you a training basis will make it easier for you to contact colleagues, which is very important especially in those early years,” she says. “Schools are also a way to put in a piece of work, because you can meet guest teachers, for example, or because just after a few years a partner can remember you for a particular role. Then you can start with specialized courses from here and there, and with each new job you will also continue to learn.”
Escribano is proud of her 2007 movie Atlas of Human Geography, and says more movies should be centered on female relationships. “In a way it annoys me,” she says. “We are so used to history being told from the male point of view that, as soon as a director and four female protagonists appear in a film, the first thing we immediately think about is where we leave the men. And when only men come out? So no one considers whether the female roles are wife, lover or even mother.”
Escribano enjoys living a normal life. “I go to the beach as I feel, I go out at night to throw the trash in slippers and come down to walk my dogs,” she says. “I think with social media it’s also a little normalized, you see that actors are the same as other people, we’re no longer unattainable stars like those in the Hollywood of the 1950s. Right now anyone can take a photo of me and upload it to Instagram. You can’t fight that and it has even been some charm to be seen that you have wrinkles, or that you go in flip flops. That has normalized and we have to turn it into a positive.”
Escribano wants movies to be as balanced as TV is when it comes to female characters. “At the Goya I wore a shawl that said ‘More female characters’,” she says. “In fiction, women make up 18% of the characters, and most of them are very uninteresting. The good thing about television is that the daily and period series has a lot of prominence for women, the bad thing is in the cinema. Television is more balanced, although not always with quality characters, they are usually devious, melodrama characters.”
Escribano is a seasoned actress with over two long-running TV shows under her belt. “It was like getting my master’s degree and doctorate in acting, all at the same time,” she says. “The truth is that television is a very good school for actors. After going through a series we realize that we handle perfectly the technical details that surround a film shoot. More than anything because you come from working 13 hours on a television set, where takes are not usually repeated.”