Urko Olazabal characterized as Luis Carrasco in ‘Maixabel’.
Urko Olazabal from Bilbao is nominated for a Goya as a supporting actor after dazzling in ‘Maixabel’. Before he was the kidnapper of Ortega Lara and the murdered Manuel Zamarreño in ‘Patria’
Urko Olazabal (Bilbao, 1978) got up early today at his house in Muskiz, but it was not because of the Goya nominations: the flood was about to wash away his car. The scare has passed quickly. After the suspense of verifying that the first three nominees as supporting actors were from ‘The Good Patron’, Nathalie Poza and José Coronado have read his name. Olazabal admits that it was not a surprise. His composition in ‘Maixabel’ by Luis Carrasco, one of the ETA members who assassinated Juan Mari Jáuregui, and years later participated in the ‘restorative encounters’ with his widow, had already made him a candidate for the Feroz and the Forqué. In the latter, he competes as the protagonist against Luis Tosar, who plays Ibon Etxezarreta in ‘Maixabel’, Javier Bardem (‘The good boss’) and Eduard Fernández (‘Mediterranean’).
«The pools said that this had to happen, but until they have said my name my wife and I have been in a hurry. We have laughed and we have cried, a very great joy », he acknowledges. The viewers of ‘Maixabel’ were already prepared to see two actors, Portillo and Tosar, but no one had warned them about this scene stealer who has been making films for just seven years. Olazabal knows that people stayed with him. “Many have told me, not just friends. Or read on Twitter: ‘You are the best of the movie’ “.
According to Olazabal, it is striking that “a stranger can be at the same height as the leading couple.” It also favors him, he argues, the script. «Maixabel’s first meeting, the most awaited moment, is with my character, not with Tosar’s. The climax comes, an ETA man talking to the woman of the man he killed, and it’s me. For those of us who are of an age and have experienced terrorism in this society, it becomes very strange, “argues an actor who has experienced the schizophrenia of incarnating two ETA members, Carrasco and Josu Bolinaga, Ortega Lara’s kidnapper in the documentary. fiction of Atresmedia ‘The decisive moment’, already a victim in ‘Homeland’: the popular councilor Manuel Zamarreño, assassinated in 1998. “I hope they do not pigeonhole me”, he ironizes.
Video.
Trailer of ‘Maixabel’.
De Zamarreño did not find a video to prepare his character. “I relied on writings from the Association of Victims of Terrorism that spoke about him.” With Luis Carrasco it was different. The actor knew that he had collaborated on the script, so he asked Bollaín if he could meet him. They stayed in San Sebastián for a leave of absence and Olazabal interviewed him for three hours. “I went with great respect and fear, I did not know what I was going to find,” he recalls. “I did not know how to treat a person who had committed these crimes. I tell you with euphemisms, but he didn’t have them. As soon as he told me that he had murdered three people, I knew how to treat him. Then I understood where it was.
The actor moved as a young man with his gang in circles of the nationalist left. That facilitated his closeness with the character. “Carrasco gave me a state of mind, his gaze, his energy … I took all of that to the character, rather than trying to imitate him.” Seen in films like ‘Errementari’ and in series like ‘Caminantes’ and ‘La que se avecina’, Urko Olazabal has only received good things since they called him to ask if he wanted to work with his favorite director. “All this has caught me in a very sweet moment, stepping on the ground, paying the mortgage and with the woman I love,” he congratulates himself.
Olazabal teaches acting classes with Richard Sahagún at the Bizie school in Bilbao and is also an audiovisual teacher at the Urretxindorra ikastola in Miribilla. “Thanks to my students I am in shape,” he says. “Middle-aged people, like me, don’t usually have many opportunities.” Gone are the days when he directed two shorts “because nobody called me an actor, as a young man I was very vain.” One shot in Mongolia, ‘Anujin’, awarded in Medina del Campo, and the other in India, ‘Mithyabadi’. Thanks to his wife, he says, he resumed the interpretation. “She made me see that the life of a director is much more difficult than that of an actor.”
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source https://pledgetimes.com/the-actor-who-has-been-twice-a-terrorist-and-victim-of-eta/
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