Original interview published on May 18, 2021
Concha Velasco has one arm out of action due to the second vaccine against covid, but sitting in front of the press at the Goya theater, where she has been performing since today, she does not stop making headlines. “Zerolo and I got gay marriage in Spain.” “I haven't been an Almodóvar girl because when he called me for What Have I Done to Deserve This I was doing Mata-Hari, by Adolfo Marsillach and it didn't seem right to me to leave it. Then there are directors who don't forgive you if you say no, but that doesn't mean that I don't admire them a lot." “At 81 she should no longer have an opinion on anything even if she continues to have her ideas, they are not going to kick me out of anywhere because I have been gone for a long time.”
And many more. “I was beautiful and I'm still not bad either, because I haven't had surgery. People can do what they want, but you start pulling and you become unknown.” "Do you know the difference between a boyfriend, a lover and a husband? With your boyfriend you walk around but you don't go to bed, with your lover you go to bed but you don't walk around and with my husband you didn't go to bed or walk around." "Conchita Velasco, the one with the yeyé girl, who is stupid, has done works like Teresa de Jesús or La vida por ante. My professional career is the most important of all the actors and actresses in Spain, the proof is that I have all the awards, they're not going to give me even one more."
The culmination comes when he explains how he appeared in Berlanga's last film. “I pursue the directors I want to work with. I had been chasing him since Boyfriend in Sight. But he told me: 'You're not too much of a monster yet, I like the ugliest people, that you're missing an eye,'” he recalls. And she became friends with his wife, María Jesús. When she saw the opportunity with Paris-Timbuktu, she told Velasco that for the casting “she would dye me fuchsia up to my pubes, and when he saw me he told me: 'You're chosen, daughter, it had to be one day.'”
The 81-year-old actress is representing María's Room today, a play directed by José Carlos Plaza about a famous writer imprisoned 43 years ago at the top of the Madrid Tower for suffering from agoraphobia. A woman who is born into a humble family and who writes secretly from her father until she begins to have enormous successes that her father takes advantage of. And until she suffers a tragedy that prevents her from leaving home. And one day the skyscraper in which she lives secluded catches fire, it has to be evacuated and she doesn't want to.
Written like his previous production, The Funeral, by his son, Manuel Martínez Velasco – “it is not the child, the son of this lady, but I am lucky to have one of the best writers who happens to be my son” –, the actress concludes that it is “a work so good that you cannot miss it because it may be the last one she does. Not because I am going to die or because I have any illness, but because one day I would have to leave it.”
A monologue that has a large technical team because the set design, he says, is not simple: "It needs nine people every day to make it. They even place the prizes, the books, the crystals... And how the house burns, with what good taste," he smiles. Nine technicians who, he concludes, “are good people who love me: at my age I care a lot about good people, we live surrounded by bad people, with bad intentions, at 81 years old I need people who love me, who hug me and who “kissed me.”
