How was the filming of ‘Hasta el cielo’ and working with Ajax and Dollar Selmouni, according to Asia Ortega

“Love, identity, empowerment and trust and care for the herd” are the pillars on which ‘Hasta el cielo: la serie’ is built.. The one who gives us these keys is the actress Asia Ortega, who is now experiencing a sweet professional moment: the premiere of this fiction on Netflix adds that of the third and final season of ‘El internado: Las cumbres’ (which arrives on Amazon Prime Video on April 7) and the filming of ‘Urban. Life is ours’ by Mediaset for Amazon. But, for now, and while we know if there will be a season 2 or not, she enjoys the good data of her series of robberies at the top of the platform and the joy of passing from high school in the original film to absolute protagonist in the serieswhose filming he admits he enjoyed a lot.

“Sole is an ambitious woman. She has the power of the neighborhood, in the outbursts she has when she gets angry and in the look and wisdom she has when she talks to people and knows how to see beyond, but later she has a lot of class and can move in colorful environments. She also has class to be able to lead that band without being carried away by the energy, ”explains the young woman,“That is complicated not only for Sole, but also for me. I have ridden with my children, I adore them, but that is testosterone and high energy all the time and I was the one who stopped the horses…”. Those “children” to which he refers are the kids who give life to the robbers that surround Sole in the series, some of them well-known urban musicians who have made the leap to interpretation at the hands of Daniel Calparsoro.

The coolness of rappers

The rappers Ajax Pedrosa, Dollar Selmouni or Jarfaiter give life to Motos, Gitano and Toño, respectively, and infuse fiction with flavor from the neighborhood. “Recording with them has been wonderful”, acknowledges Asia Ortega, “They are pure dynamite. And hunger meets the desire to eat. I am the same, but from so much work you learn to dose and to know that not all information has to be exposed to the world; There are times for dynamite and times for calm. In a shoot, the dynamite must be focused so that the detonation works and the metal can be removed from the mine. It has been glory because all the children bring freshness and also Alana, who had not previously performed anything other than in her Instagram videos”. In this case, she talks about Alana La Hija del Jeque, makeup artist and influencer who has also made her debut in acting with this project.

“They are very professional, although it is true that it was a soiree the day they all came; I scream here and there, joking… but then at work time, they worked. They have been a love, they were asking me, we would show the sequences the night before after dinner and I would give them advice. They bring a truth and a freshness that is not studied”, he tells us. Like his peers, Ortega is also interested in music and, in fact, in ‘Urban. Life is ours’ we will see her sing. Has she dared to propose to the rappers a collaboration? “With Dolar I appeared in one of her video clips, but as an actress. As a singer? I want. I have my little things around and I sing with my people in my neighborhood”.

A fun and international shoot

“The heaviest thing about ‘Hasta el cielo’ is that, being as amazing as it is, you believe everything. It’s amazingly real. They are real sticks and it is inspired by real people”, affirms the actress. This verisimilitude is born from the scripts by Jorge Guerricaechevarría and from the staging of the series. Its filming was complicated, due to the production needs of a story with so much action and vehicles like this, but that does not intimidate Asia Ortega: “I think it is very fun and more with Daniel Calparsoro who goes to 200% all day. It’s that he doesn’t even eat on set, he works 27 hours a day. And the emotion infects you. We finished filming an action sequence, in which I would go out full blast and see his face like a child in a toy store, happy because it was turning out well. The action is not heavy for me because it’s not just the action, you also have an internal character conflict and that makes my hair stand on end. It’s the ‘hardest now’ all the time.”

Madrid, Galicia, Paris or Nigeria have been some of the places where the filming of ‘Hasta el cielo: La serie’ has passed. Regarding the latter, the protagonist recalls: “What happened in Nigeria was… imagine, we went to the filming set in an armored car with soldiers inside and a patrol car in front and another behind. Obviously, the neighborhood drug trafficker had to be warned that we were going to shoot there, in every alley there were armed people… What’s more, in some sequence I think one of the men who was watching me is seen, one with a pink jersey coming out in the Nigerian market. And he was next to me because that’s where they looked at me with the face of ‘what are you doing here dressed in a miniskirt in a Muslim country, my darling?’ It was tremendous, but that gives it a lot of truth.”