Alberto Estrella as “Macario” for the telenovela My path is to love you (Photo: Jaime Noagles/Medios y Media/Getty Images)
Very much in the 21st century, but at that time there are still sectors that cling to imposing canons of beauty that, fortunately, many refuse to reproduce further. In the entertainment industry, Michelle Rodríguez, Yuridia, Bárbara Torres and Yalitza Aparicio are some exemplary women who have said enough and empowered us with their actions.
But these archaic rules didn’t just fall on them. Some men were also affected by not fitting into the given mold, as happened to the actor Alberto Estrella, who was offered to pay him to transform him physically without considering the great talent he possesses.
Estrella is recognized as a Mexican theater, film and television actor and has appeared in more than 20 plays and more than 100 film productions in a career spanning just over four decades. He has played several characters, but the villain roles are the ones he plays best. While he’s content playing strong-willed characters, he once confessed that he couldn’t explain why he was almost always chosen as the villain in the story.
“In acting, life can be recreated, and over time I discovered that the characters allow the actor to have different facets, something that not much can be done in real life,” he said in an interview with El Universal.
Role that makes, role that imposes for the security that confers it. As can be forgotten in his rendition of Guerrero Águila in the 1986 Mexico World Cup promo, in which he traversed space-time from pre-Hispanic Mexico to the modern day, where he also demonstrated his also questioned dancing skills.
Despite this prejudice, which he had faced since the beginning of his career, nothing had prepared him for the day when a producer scrutinized him with the idea of sending him in for plastic surgery.
“They recommended me for one of the first projects (on TV) and they said ‘yes it does’ and then this woman in her office quotes me and she starts ‘nose yes please you need it’ and wrote below, ‘a bit more chin… it seems to me that we’re going to open the eyes a bit more here’. And I looked at them in horror because I was convinced that they were paying me extra for the surgery, that I was going to have the surgery because the bags under my eyes, because my eyes were very small, when the nose was very wide and necessary, when the chin had to be split…” he told the show Mimi Contigo.
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(They wanted to turn me) into someone I wasn’t!, or what was believed a television actor should be, which is a prejudice. Luckily I had this formation of ‘accept yourself as you are, that’s what you’re going to offer’ and the characters emerge from within you, not from the fact that you have a forked beard or the biggest cheekbones, but from you. Albert Stern
As can be inferred, the actor didn’t take up the offer and his decision was welcomed by filmmaker Arturo Risptein – the first to give him a break in the film industry in the 1986 film El imperio de la fortuna. “When Ripstein said to me, ‘Alberto, the camera loves you,’ I said, ‘Yes, I already did’.” They worked together again on The Beginning and the End, for which she received her first Ariel nomination.
And precisely his talent is the most important compliment that Estrella has received in his life. In the same conversation with Mimi, the businessman also recalled meeting the leading actress Marga López, for whom he felt deep admiration and, without knowing it, it was mutual.
Except that Argentina achieved more: she gave him the Ariel, which she received for the Salón México in 1949 when she did not receive the statuette for her acting work.
In a later interview Estrella assured that his physique will only change if the character requests it, otherwise he will remain as is..
“If the character needs to be shaved, if the character needs to lose weight or gain weight, I always agree that the actor has to do whatever it takes to make the character, the character, be believable and believable in front of people.”