In May 2017, the body of Pedro Rodríguez, an agent of the Barcelona Urban Police, was found burned inside a car in the Foix reservoir (Alt Penedès). The event immediately aroused the attention of public opinion, especially as the investigation revealed a network of toxic relationships and sexual scandals involving Pedro and two of his police colleagues: his partner Rosa Peral and his lover Albert López. .
What is known as "the crime of the Urban Police" comes to the small screen this Friday with the Netflix premiere of The Body on Fire, a miniseries that recreates how Rosa Peral (played in fiction by Úrsula Corberó) drew up a plan to kill the victim, Pedro Rodríguez (José Manuel Poga), in collaboration with Albert López (Quim Gutiérrez). In 2020, Peral and López were sentenced to prison for this murder.
Corberó and Gutiérrez explain to La Vanguardia that interpreting these two characters has been quite a challenge. “The challenge was to go deeper and give them layers so as not to be left alone with the information that everyone already had,” answers Corberó. “And when I say go deeper, I mean, as an actress, to find the reason for things, to understand the insecurities, fears, complexes of the characters and where their ambition comes from,” explains who Tokyo was in Money Heist.
“All of this has been captured during the eight episodes of the series,” he says. Without giving a “heroic” character to these characters, The Burning Body does seek to “tell why they did it and make the viewer wonder in the end if he would be capable of acting like that in those circumstances.”
Gutiérrez recognizes that playing characters who are initially not going to be liked, like Albert López, “is an attractive approach that produces more interest than rejection in me.” And he explains why: “Not to make people like him, but when there is a contrary social opinion because someone has done something that we consider to be wrong, and without me judging, it seems like a challenge to try to humanize it, rather than justify it morally or exonerate him, and understand what leads someone who does not have a manifest pathology to harm and kill. I am interested in the human side of someone who experiences that situation because they are surely a victim of their circumstances, whatever they may be.”
During the filming of The Body on Fire, both performers tried to find answers to why their characters acted the way they did. “A very recurring question that I asked myself because everyone asked me was what need did Rosa Peral have to do that when she could separate and continue with her life in a calmer way. In the end I came to the conclusion that Peral thought that she would not be able to get rid of Pedro because of the obsession he had with her and that even her life was in danger if he left her.
What Gutiérrez had the hardest time imagining was “how for someone who is neither a psychopath nor a serial killer, killing another person is the only viable option and I often got stuck there.” To find an answer, he read a criminology book and found “a reasonable explanation and that is that in the end the murderer always believes that he is repairing moral damage; That is, in his principles and in his socio-emotional context, he considers that a wrong has been committed and that the only way to repair it is murder.
The premiere of The Burning Body is complemented by The Tapes of Rosa Peral, a documentary that collects the first-person and unpublished testimony of Peral, who, through video calls, breaks her silence from prison. The documentary also offers interviews with those closest to her, the prosecutor and the lawyers in the case, as well as journalists who covered the event.
