On Google, when searching for Jesús Mosquera the legend “professional soccer player” appears. The description is incomplete, or at least outdated. The Spaniard left his sports career a few years ago to try himself as an actor. With no previous experience and by a stroke of fate he debuted as the protagonist of 'Toy Boy', the Netflix series where he played a stripper that catapulted him to massive success.
Now, she took another step in her career and was encouraged to join the cast of 'Somos nosotros' in Argentina, at the Multitabarís Comafi theater alongside Denise Dumas, Sofía Pachano, Gastón Soffritti and Lionel Arostegui.
“People don't understand, they are surprised. It was a turning point in my life. When you take the helm of a ship and change route completely,” says Mosquera about his job change, which, he assures, was the most important turning point on a personal level. “It was like becoming another person,” she describes.
A month ago, the 30-year-old actor arrived in Argentina for the first time. He didn't know the country or his future castmates, except for the occasional Zoom.
It was an Argentinian who had spoken to him, with nostalgia, about the wonders of these lands. The same one who gave him the passion for football. Among other teams, Mosquera played for Málaga, Athletic Bilbao, Betis B and Antequera.
“I have been playing since I was four years old. When my parents bought the house in Malaga, our neighbor was Argentine, Martín. And he was a soccer fan. And there I started watching football and wanting to play all the time. He played in the streets, at school, kicking cans, stones, whatever he had."
And Mosquera continues: "Sometimes the ball was bigger than us. I would go out alone and my mother had to come at night to look for me because I was still playing. She said that I didn't have homework to continue kicking and I did it at night, "in the dark, so they wouldn't scold me. If I didn't train, I went to the park. I only thought about soccer."
- Until it stopped being a game and became your way of life.
- Yes, it became an activity, with training, with sacrifice. My mother, my father, my grandfather, my sister... All going from one place to another for the games. The family sacrificed a lot for my dreams, for my fun, because it was what I liked the most.
-How did you travel that path to professionalization?
- I felt it very strongly, because from the ages of 10 to 16 I was playing for Málaga, which is a First Division club, but it was in my town. From there I went to Bilbao. From south to north, two years. And it was already in full adolescence. I led a life arrhythmic to that of my friends. I had a training contract, there was already pressure. Suddenly, I had a salary similar to my father's when I was 16 years old playing soccer.
They welcomed me well, but suddenly my colleagues became competition. Before we all played happily, you scored a goal and someone else was happy. There came a time when it was competition, and if you score, I'm not happy. You are competing with your partner. And that is the error. There is evil in the air, a hostile environment. Then, of course, there comes a time when you say: “This is no longer a game.” And then I understood that it had to be handled differently.
-And today, what do you miss about being on the field, the locker rooms?
- These days I lived a very nice moment in the theater and it was the previous one. Being in the dressing room is like being in a locker room. Warm up with your teammates, warm up your voice, your body... It's like when you went out, did your stretches and warmed up before the game. When you go out to shout: “Whatever it comes, let's go, let's go with everything.”
There are many similarities between football and acting. It is a teamwork.
- Pre-16 football is back.
- Yes of course. A game. It is difficult at a certain age to find work teams that think like this. And being in one of them in this work fascinates me. An Argentine teacher, one day in class, told a classmate: “Look, this is like a soccer game. We can do text analysis, rehearse, like a player can watch 500,000 videos of his rival and get to know him and how he plays, but when the referee blows his whistle you don't know where he is going to go. And the theater is the same.
-What is your character like in 'This is us' and how did you work on it?
It has been a very creative process, listening above all, because the directors and writers had done the show before and knew very well what they wanted. There is something in my character that is a desperation of not understanding why they tell him the truth. He would prefer that his life continue in silence, because there are things that he did at the time and kept silent.
The most difficult thing was finding the tone so that what we were saying didn't become a drama. We ran the risk of going to a very dense place. The same word, the same phrase, said in one tone or another is a world. It is another different work.
Memories of his homeland
Jesus talks about Malaga, his land, and a smile appears on his face. The thing is that no matter how much his work led him to pack his bags since he was little, he never spent much time without returning to that coastal town in the south of Spain.
"I live in Fuengirola, which is almost a city, between Marbella and Malaga, 30 minutes from both. I live in a humble neighborhood. When my parents met and got married, they went to Malaga where my sister and I were born. We are the first generation of Malaga residents. My little house was humble and now it has become a bigger house because my father is a bricklayer. He modified it all with the help of us, his friends and co-workers," he says.
"Construction is a super, super hard profession, and I heard him say it, until I started helping and understood the sacrifice he had. When I saw my mother walking with him I thought: 'This woman, what power.' "We all work to make our house so it has something very special," says the actor who, although he lived in Madrid for six years, never spent more than a month and a half without returning to his homeland.
“The city devoured me. “Madrid takes you at a very, very high pace and I needed to take off my shoes, touch the sand and take a dip in the sea and be calm,” he adds.
Mosquera as a player knew that activity has an expiration date. When he finished high school he enrolled in Economics, but he didn't like the degree. Before leaving professional football overnight, he thought that his future was going to be linked to physiotherapy. After having overcome some injuries and receiving help, he imagined helping other players recover to return to the court.
“I really liked seeing a person who had spent several months injured playing again and seeing him smile. Accompanying a person like that was something that excited me. I had never fantasized about acting,” she reveals.
- How did you get signed at a gym for a role in the Netflix series 'Toy Boy'?
- A casting assistant saw me exercising and told me: “Hey, I want to introduce you to a casting we are going to do for a series.” I was doing my back, I will never forget it in my life. At first I said yes, but then since it was at the gym I thought it wasn't something serious and I didn't go. Then the girl told the owner of the place that I had not gone to try on and that she found the profile. And he convinced me. Between jokes, I showed up and went through castings until they called me and told me I had to go to Madrid.
- Did you know that you would play a stripper?
- Not so much, because they were between two papers. And they were giving me the information little by little. They asked me if I danced and I said no. Until when they gave me the news that I had left and had to move, they told me: “You have to learn to interpret and dance.”
It was a very drastic change. I left football after 20 years. It cost me a lot. Already having the role, when I returned to Malaga from the meeting, I told my family that I didn't know what to do. He said, am I leaving football? So that? But there was a part of me that said, “I'm going to learn. And if it doesn't work out, I will always be able to return to the category in which I was playing."
- And the series was a success. What do you think it meant for your career?
- I think that on a professional level it has been a great showcase to make myself known. Being in Argentina is the result of them seeing a project I did. That was unthinkable years ago. So, it's a gift. And, on the other hand, on a personal level, it changed my life.
So now every time people ask me what I'm going to do in the future. I say: “I was going to play football and look where I ended up.” I mean, don't put me in a position to choose. Today I am sure that in the end life also takes you and you have to let yourself go.
