The Argentine actor Luis Brandoni and the American Robert de Niro have been friends for four decades. A friendship that they have transferred to the characters they play in the Argentine series Nada, recently released on Disney. Manuel (Brandoni) is an inflexible culinary critic from Buenos Aires who lives in low hours but has the aura of a dandy and who receives a visit at his house from his friend Vincent (De Niro), a famous New York writer. The visit occurs while Manuel is forced to hire Antonia (Majo Cabrera), an inexperienced young woman, to help him with household chores and whom he will have to instruct on countless aspects of life.
“My character Manuel is a very sufficient guy and knows many things, but in others as basic as making a couple of fried eggs he is completely ignorant. This ambiguity enriches the possibilities of interpreting it,” comments Brandoni, who also points out that this food critic “considers that people like bad reviews more than praiseworthy ones and that is why he always tries to be as harsh and as less pious as possible.”
Brandoni explains to La Vanguardia how it turned out that De Niro participated, for the first time in his 60-year career, in a series. “We met many years ago in Buenos Aires and then we met in Uruguay. Later, when I went to New York to film some scenes for the movie Made in Argentina (1986), he found out that I was there and invited me to spend Christmas Eve at his house so that I wouldn't be alone, even though I was with my wife and some visitors,” he remembers. From then on, the relationship became even closer to this day.
The directors and producers of the series, Mariano Cohn and Gastón Duprat, were delighted that this friendship had allowed them to work with the protagonist of Taxi Driver and Raging Bull. How was it working with him? “It is easier to work with veterans like De Niro or Brandoni than with an actor who is starting out because what an actor asks for, no matter how great he is, are essential things like understanding his character or for the director to be sure of where he wants to go” , Cohn responds.
“Nothing portrays a friendship with its contradictions but, above all, in this case, with a character like Manuel who has lived with so many certainties, dogmas and absolute truths that when something happens in his life that makes him reinvent himself at 80 years old, "He discovers that many of the things he held tightly for decades were not as intelligent, relevant or important as he thought," Duprat continues.
Manuel will live this process through the character of Antonia and the person who narrates and ends up participating in this plot will be the character of Robert de Niro (attention to the hilarious introductions in each chapter where Vincent describes some gastronomic and Argentine expressions). “The relationship established between these two very different people with so many differences is very attractive for the viewer. The reasons why this man will let himself win the heart of this girl are very cute and she offers a few drops of tenderness that are good for the series,” says Brandoni.
Another protagonist of Nada is the city of Buenos Aires. “We wanted to print a local look without having to impose because it is the world that we navigate and the city that we know,” reveals Duprat. Tribute, then, to the Argentine capital but also to Buenos Aires cuisine. "The series is crossed by several tributaries and fusions: Spanish, Italian, Paraguayan, Peruvian, Creole cuisine... And all of this added to the figure of the culinary critic who is an endangered breed."
