Fernando Guillén Cuervo (61) maintains a very close relationship with his son Manuel (20): “We have traveled a lot together and I have taken him to filming,” comments the actor. And now my son is studying at the Madrid School of Cinematography and Audiovisual (ECAM) and we are writing a project. It is wonderful to be able to work together,” he says proudly.
Father and son have enjoyed a guided tour experience that the Dyc distilleries in Palazuelos de Eresma (Segovia) have designed for Father's Day, although they are also available the rest of the year. “It has been a very nice experience and especially because I have shared it with my son. We are not drinkers but we liked learning about the whiskey manufacturing process, the history of the building, which is an old convent from the 15th century, and the surroundings,” Fernando Guillén Cuervo confesses to this newspaper.
But for the actor, the visit has also brought back the memory of his father, Fernando Guillén, who died 11 years ago: "My father did drink whiskey and I used to have some with him." And he adds: “We had a very close relationship based on friendship and collaboration and that is the legacy that I try to pass on to my son.”
Natalia (1961), Fernando (1963) and Cayetana (1969) are the three children that Fernando Guillén and Gemma Cuervo had. Two renowned actors who have seen how their two youngest children have followed in their footsteps in acting. “I don't rule out that my son also ends up being an actor,” says Guillén Cuervo, “but now he is training, like my sister and I did, who studied Information Sciences, I in the Audiovisual branch and she in Journalism. My parents insisted on it a lot because studies give you tools. My father, for example, studied Law.”
“I spent my childhood in theater companies watching my parents perform great classics,” he recalls. However, Fernando Guillén Cuervo's debut as an actor was not in the theater but on television, in La saga de los Rius, playing Joaquín Rius as a child, the same role that his father played in the popular series. Later they also coincided in The Law of Desire and The Bilingual Lover.
“I am 50 percent Guillén and 50 percent Cuervo. From my father I have inherited the intellectual part and from my mother the intuitive part,” says the actor. Curiously, he has never worked with his mother, who is about to turn 90 and is a social media star. “She is receiving a lot of love from the public,” he says. He has coincided with his sister Cayetana on television in series such as Second Teaching or Raquel Seek Her Place. “We were very young, so I would love to work with her again now as an adult.”
Married twice, to Elena González (Manuel's mother) and to Ana Milan; His current partner is the actress Lupe Cartié, with whom he is preparing a theater project together and “I am also developing a series about Felipe II.” Because Fernando Guillén Cuervo, in addition to being an actor, is a director, screenwriter and producer. “What feeds me is my work as an actor, but the other facets help me to know and understand all the roles better.”
His work as an actor has taken him to work all over the world, starting in Barcelona. “It is the hometown of my parents, my older sister and mine, but shortly after I was born we settled in Madrid, where Cayetana was already born. Barcelona is very important to me professionally because I filmed some of my first films there, such as Boom Boom, by Rosa Vergés, or Havanera by Antoni Verdaguer.
Fernando Guillén Cuervo has also developed an international career whose most emblematic title is Quantum of Solace. “Working on a James Bond film is a universe apart. I have the odd offer from an international production but it is not easy,” he says.
It was precisely on one of these international shoots, in Cuba, that Fernando Guillén Cuervo discovered one of his hobbies, diving. “I have the title. It is a sport with some risk, but seeing the sea from the inside is wonderful. My last dive was recently in Girona, he says. I used to practice skiing, but I've stopped because of age, or maybe because I've become lazier (he jokes). It's funny how you change with age, I was very urban, and now the city stuns me, but the countryside gives me serenity."
