‘Everyone lies’: interview with Irene Arcos about Movistar+’s new suspense series

Imagine her holding wires at the age of 24 in ‘Hospital Central’… just behind the scenes. We are in the late 90’s Irene Arcos He has studied Audiovisual Communication at the Complutense because, in addition to acting, he has always liked writing and it wasn’t too long since ‘Thesis’ was released. She adores Amenábar. So why not. She is a valet and is doing well. Only that in reality when she sees the actors in action she is eaten away by envy (healthy or insane, who cares) and she drowns. “There I was pulling the cable, until there came a time when I said to myself: We only have one life. So I left everything and to pay for my studies at an acting school I started working on millions of things. I was a telemarketer for a while and as an usherette at the Price… You can’t imagine how beautiful it was when the colleagues from the Union of Actors gave me the award for Best New Actress –for ‘Elpier’– and the delivery was right there, at the Price! , that I know him completely”.

And it is that the success, finally, of Irene Arcos after 11 years of small roles and putting her soul and body day after day in her profession cannot be called anything other than poetic justice. “They tell you: They have discovered you. But obviously I had already discovered myself, I was just waiting for someone to look at me once and for all”.

Something different and powerful

Since 2019, when the first season of ‘El pier’ (Movistar +) was filmed, until today everything has been a chain of projects and collecting awards and nominations. “You can’t imagine how excited I was to be nominated for Best Theater Actress at the Silver Frames for ‘Betrayal’, by Harold Pinter”. And we haven’t stopped seeing her in ‘Vis a vis’, in ‘Elite’…; small roles in which she has not been able to avoid stealing plane. Because for the majority 2020 was a year of paralyzed or lost projects, but not for her, who in the harshest of the harsh confinement received a call from the director Pau Freixas to go to Barcelona to do a casting. “It was the worst time, people were dying and I left Madrid on a practically empty train with a special permit, four masks and fear in my body”.

Waiting for her on the other side was the director of ‘Héroes’ (2010) and of series like ‘I know who you are’ (Antena 3) and the mythical ‘Pulseras Rojas’ (TV3), who after several tests with the windows wide open for her to run the air and not the virus, confirmed to the actress that she was inside ‘Everyone lies’ (Movistar +). “I had never had the opportunity to have all the scripts for a series before shooting began and I devoured them. I was hooked because from reading it it was clear that we were going to do something different and very powerful”. And why do you think it is different? “Because of Pau’s head and because of the mix of tones: because now we are in a thriller and now in a black comedy and then in a drama, and all of that is already planned from the writing itself”.

In ‘Todos mienten’, Irene Arcos plays Macarena, whose video of her having sex with a student –and her best friend’s son– is the bomb that dynamites the precarious stability of an urbanization with high purchasing power where secrecy and lies are exchange currency. What she wants, what she wants, what she thinks, what she feels or what Macarena is going to do are unknowns that are not easy to clarify. Almost as if Irene Arcos suffered from Ingrid Bergman’s lack of definition syndrome in ‘Casablanca’, but filtered by the empowerment and rage of the third wave of feminism and #MeToo. “She is a woman who has achieved everything she longed for in life and suddenly she has realized that she is not happy. The question of why that inner emptiness is not filled leads her to make drastic decisions, as if she put the pilot automatic self-destruction and instead of solving things he didn’t mind blowing everything up kamikaze-style”.

Who is the murderer

And to the sentimental issue is added, of course, the criminal. Since the six chapters of ‘Everyone Lies’ also function as a puzzle of disordered pieces that the viewer (and the script) are dosing until they lead us to the real murderer… or murderess. A cluedo structure between four families who share a school, which in some details is reminiscent of the first season of ‘Big Little Lies’, and not only because Nicole Kidman spent a large part of the flashbacks dressed as Holly Golightly while Irene Arcos here does it as a flamenco. The spoiler is in the title of the series itself: everyone lies.

And who are they all? A cast with the best of Spanish cinema that seemed like a dream to Irene Arcos. “What am I going to tell you if in fiction Juan Diego Botto is my brother; Leo Sbaraglia, my husband, and I am hand in hand with Natalia Verbeke, Miren Ibarguren and Eva Santolaria? It was a beautiful shoot. Because while the world was in Pause, we lived in our bubble of ‘Everyone lies’ and there was a plus of desire to work and work hard. A resistance in the face of uncertainty. And you see, no one caught the virus “.

This article appears published in the February 2022 issue of FOTOGRAMAS magazine