Calle de la Redondilla, near Plaza de la Paja and the Segovia Viaduct, is pure Madrid and Spanish history. In the central district of La Latina, in the old Alfonso VI district. Located here, the philosopher María Zambrano grew up. It’s a Tuesday in early October, but it could easily be May 31, 1906. An unusual autumn heat, fifty appropriately dressed extras in contemporary clothing and a historic rental carriage facilitate the jump in time. The scene recreates the eventful wedding day of Victoria Eugenia de Battenberg and Alfonso
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Co-produced by the public broadcaster together with La Cometa TV and Zona App, it is a miniseries about the life of a specific queen and a specific Spain from 1905 to 1945, based on the novel of the same name by the queen writer Pilar Eyre. Six chapters tell the story of the changes in Victoria Eugenia de Battenberg’s life in a country marked by two world wars, a civil war and a major pandemic, the so-called Spanish flu.
Moment in which RTVE and La Cometa TV reported the failed attack during the wedding of Victoria Eugenia and Alfonso XIII in Madrid at the beginning of October. Stalk Olga Martin
Things from fiction, at a time when filming has stopped, the actors Kimberley Tell and Joan Amargós, who play the Spanish monarchs, lovingly greet from the wedding vehicle the actor Jaume Madaula, who plays the anarchist Mateo Morral. He was responsible for a bitter wedding gift. A bomb aimed at the couple killed 28 people but failed to achieve its goal of murdering Victoria and Alfonso, marking the tragic beginning of a not particularly happy marriage. On one side of the street, a production team collects cans of dust, sand and fake blood. With all this they want to smear the extras of the series in a few minutes. The explosion sequence is timed so that shots are fired the first time. It is the result of months of preparation, explains Olivares.
In this case, the showrunner is happy with the result. It is always complex for an artist to see how what he has designed on paper is realized. This is even more true when this moment is a historical fact that must combine rigor and entertainment with the limitations inherent in any television production. “It’s strange. There is a lot of talk about talent in this industry, even though good talent rarely appears. Even if you have it, it’s all pure technique, discipline and methodology. “It all depends on everyone just doing their job,” he comments in a bar on the same street in La Redondilla.
The Spanish character influences his own historiography. “It’s very biased, which is why foreign Hispanics like Geoffrey Parker usually tell it best,” laments the series’ creator. “And it is absolutely forbidden for me to both look at the past with current eyes and to mislead the viewer into an opinion. I propose a landscape so that the audience can think what they want,” he continues.
Although it is essential to make connections to the present. On the one hand we have a folksy Alfonso The profile is very familiar to the Spaniards of the current monarchy. “In addition to his enormous ability to seduce, none other than Winston Churchill said of him that he was one of the great personalities of his time,” warns Olivares.
A moment from the recording of “Ena”.Olga Martín
But the real protagonist of the story is his wife, Ena from the title. The story of a woman who left her family, her customs, her culture behind and had to renounce her religion to live in a foreign land (and in front of a people who did not come to worship her) needed the guidance of two women: Anaïs Pareto and Estel Diaz. The series focuses not only on his marital relationship, but also on the relationship he had with another woman, his mother-in-law, Queen Emeritus María Cristina, played by Elvira Mínguez. Was Victoria Eugenia a misunderstood queen? There were differences of opinion in both directions, defends Olivares. She, who has a British education and a very different concept of democracy and monarchy than Spain’s, “did not understand the country where she lived, where the monarch allowed a coup,” she comments. This aspect of the queen caused the screenwriter to take a step back and recompose the character in his script.
There will also appear some chapters by Ena Primo de Rivera, played by Mariano Peña, and even Ángel Ruiz, who brings to life García Lorca, his same character in The Ministry of Time. And Olivares already has his own television universe, a kind of historical version of the Marvel heroes, he himself jokes. The man from Madrid is still waiting for a channel or a platform that dares to buy the series about King Juan Carlos I, a kind of Spanish “The Crown” that he wrote for The Mediapro Studio.
Ena’s recording, which never takes place on set, began weeks earlier at the Magdalena Palace in Santander, where the monarch spent much of her summers in Spain. And while its two protagonists celebrate as they get out of the carriage, it takes advantage of the realism that consists of seeing some of the real places where the events took place or other very similar places: the Royal Palace of Madrid, the Palace of La Granja (Segovia). ), the Palace of Santoña (Madrid) and the Palace of Fernán Núñez (Madrid).
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