‘Santo’, the new Netflix series: two policemen in search of a faceless murderer for one of the most ambitious Spanish fictions

Screenwriter Carlos Lopez (Prince, Office shift: ten years later) has gone around so many times in the fiction industry that he is aware like anyone else that “everything has already been invented”. But with his new project, as creator of the police series Holy, from Netflix, opens several unprecedented doors for a Spanish production. He made the leap from journalism to writing for film and television in the mid-nineties in a very peculiar way, taking charge of signing a gala of the Goya awards. Since then, he assures that he is not afraid of any project. “I have always gotten into things that have been great for me, that I did not know how they were done. I learned as I went along ”, he recounted at the beginning of September in a telematic conversation.

From that fear of the unknown goes to a large extent Holy, which hits the platform this Friday. Is a thriller action and intrigue with a lot of psychological and reflective drama and some touches of the horror genre. Because the antagonist has no face. He is about a drug dealer whom two policemen opposed to each other, the Spanish Millán (Raul Arevalo) and the Brazilian Cardona (Bruno Gagliasso), try to hunt down from Madrid and Salvador de Bahía. The only real and tangible link with the criminal is her lover, Bárbara (Victória Guerra), a mysterious Portuguese woman who in recent years has immersed herself in the world of spirituality and violence of her partner. “She is in the middle of Cadona and Millán. She has returned from evil and does not have the same moral limits as the two of them ”, advances the person in charge of the series.

“Evil is always more disturbing when it is invisible. The first fear recognized by all is the fear of the dark, of not being able to face your enemies, of not knowing what is happening to you and of not getting a diagnosis of what your ills are”, says López. And these two policemen, after so much chasing an unknown evil, end up looking for it within themselves.

To carry out a series “that is baroque in its conception, because it mixes various genres and cultures, but that seeks to be accessible to the viewer”, as defined by López, the showrunner has spent many months working in Brazil. Soaking in the complex religious reality of the country has been key to completing this story. “While in Spain, in general, religion is lived in a very incredulous way, in Brazil it is an essential part of society and it is not usually a private matter, but is often experienced as something collective. There they asked me what religion Cardona’s character belongs to and it is something that impressed me, because it is a question that in Spain we have never considered when explaining a character, unless that defined their plots”, he comments.

Holy It is a 100% Spanish production run by Netflix and Nostromo Pictures, but it is a Brazilian —Vicente Amorim, also in charge of the miniseries centered on the life of the pilot Ayrton Senna— who directs the chapters written by López. “The greatest complexity of the series has been that, even though it was Spanish, it seemed to the Brazilian public to be a fiction from there. And that the plot of Salvador de Bahía did not have a European perspective, full of folklore and clichés, like when a Tom Cruise movie mixes the Fallas and Holy Week”, comments its creator. The fiction has had a religious adviser specialized in filming, who has also advised the team in the previous writing process and in post-production. “In the part shot in Brazil, we were 150 team members and only five of them were Spanish, so it was very difficult for those scenes not to have a local flavor”, explains López.

Regarding the particular mix of genres, the other great challenge of this fiction, the work with the leading actors has been paramount. “With Raúl Arévalo he had already met in The Embassy and even then I had not met an actor in Spain who understood a script so well. Later he directed his own movie [Tarde para la ira, de 2016] and I understood more things. He has a special intelligence and over the years he has gained a lot when it comes to managing and dosing his interpretive resources to tell many things with them. vincent [Amorim] I was amazed at his acting ability during the first days of shooting”, recalls López.

With Victória Guerra (seen in the Spanish-Portuguese co-production dry water), the person in charge of Holy he was looking for an actress who was a foreigner both in Brazil and in Spain, so that “she would give her that enigmatic thing that the foreigner has”. He did a live telematic audition of her “and it was so fascinating that halfway through the test I was already thinking about how the character was going to work with her,” he admits. Bruno Gagliasso is a star in Brazil “of which he cannot go out, so he really enjoyed filming in Madrid.” He threw himself into the role “in a tremendous way, with intense physical and emotional preparation that lasted for months.”

Y Greta Fernandezwinner of the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival in 2019 for The daughter of a thief, completes the main quartet as a young police officer who works alongside Raúl Arévalo’s Millán. “She had never played a police officer with a gun in her hand, she is a physical character but at the same time with a great personal dilemma. She is someone who is starting out in her profession and who is precisely trying to know where is good and where is evil ”. Like the rest of the protagonists, she will discover that evil is invisible and is everywhere.

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