For Ricardo Gómez (Collado Villalba, Madrid, 29 years old) and Elena Rivera (Zaragoza, 31 years old), their work on “Tell me how it happened” was the work of a lifetime. They grew up in front of the eyes of all of Spain in one of the most successful series. Gómez was only seven years old when he became the focal point through which the life of the Alcántara family was told. Rivera joined in 2005 when she was 13 years old. In 2018, they announced their decision to leave the series. They did it hand in hand and return in the same way for the last episode that La 1 broadcasts this Wednesday (10:50 p.m.). Last week they met in Madrid for their only joint interview to mark the end of Cuéntame.
“It was a little strange because we had already gone through what the team went through months ago and what the public went through, we had these moments of grief, of sadness, of liberation…” begins Ricardo Gómez. “It was always a question of whether we would return,” Elena Rivera continues. “We would do it if everything had meaning, coherence and the same essence as when we left. Just as we were walking hand in hand, we came back like this, reading everything between the two of us and seeing if we were happy with the return.”
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For the final episode, which highlights the emotional tone that dominated the entire last season, Gómez and Rivera filmed for just over a week. “The return was strange. It was like meeting a couple you haven’t seen in a long time: you know there’s a lot of love, but you don’t know how they’ll be now. I was nervous but they made it very easy for us and welcomed us as if no time had passed. The first and second day I felt a bit strange, but then it was like usual,” recalls the actor. “There was a brutal mix of emotions. Our duel, our end, was already five years ago. We came to accompany her. But day after day the emotion comes out and in the end everything came out, it was very beautiful,” summarizes Rivera.
Elena Rivera and Ricardo Gómez on their farewell to “Cuéntame” five years ago.
Neither of them has regretted the decision they made five years ago to leave Cuéntame. “I still talk about this point where everything went very well, we are privileged. But at that moment it was a leap into the void,” remembers Rivera. “It could have gone better or worse, but the decision at that moment was that as an artist I needed new settings and I don’t regret that at all,” Gómez continues. “Now I feel more like an instrument of closure, I just did my part to make the conclusion cohesive because I was part of the series for 17 years.”
Getting rid of the characters they grew up with didn’t seem like an easy task. Many people still recognize them as Carlitos and Karina. You get it. “But the most important minds from which Carlos and Karina had to emerge in order to grow were ours, and that is what happened,” says Ricardo Gómez. “We were lucky to have projects that put us in a different situation and very big challenges,” adds Elena Rivera. Were you consciously looking for roles other than Carlos Alcántara and Karina Saavedra? “There is a misconception about actors voting in Spain. Maybe Tosar and De la Torre do, but the majority don’t. I consider myself lucky to have some agency, not about what I do, but about what I don’t do. I can say I don’t feel like it, and I have the financial cushion and job security to do it,” argues Gómez. “Fortunately, and this is the most complicated thing we have done in these years, we have convinced some people, those who make casting or production decisions, that there are profiles that they have never seen with us and that we could do.” And then we worked hard on it. In my case, not with the fear of doing something different, but with the desire to do something different,” the actor adds.
Elena Rivera and Ricardo Gómez walk through Madrid a week before the broadcast of the last episode of “Cuéntame”.Claudio Álvarez
During these years, Elena Rivera has chained one project after another, from theater to the series “Inés del alma mia”, “Alba” and “Camilo Superstar” and others. Ricardo Gómez was also on stage and took part in productions such as “Romancero” and “La ruta”. The filming he is currently working on prevented him from traveling to Barcelona to accept the Ondas Prize for “La Ruta” with the rest of the team and kept him until after five in the morning on the day of this interview took place, awake. “I felt firsthand that the audiovisual industry wanted to welcome us,” remembers Gómez.
From their years in Cuéntame, the two remember with particular affection the hours they spent with the rest of the cast between recordings. Also the complicity that the two still maintain, a relationship that became a friendship beyond the series. “I think I haven’t had a relationship [amorosa] It helped a lot between us, which in this job means that relationships are very limited,” says Gómez about the good harmony between Rivera and him, both on screen and off.
Elena Rivera and Ricardo Gómez, in an archive image from “Cuéntame.”
On the set of Cuéntame, Ricardo Gómez and Elena Riviera learned a profession around some of the country’s most renowned actors. “I don’t know what I learned from Echanove, from Terele Pávez, from Fernán Gómez… What I do know is that I was lucky enough to be able to share with them the place where things happen. Transfer occurs through filtration. My way of being on set, facing a text, planning, looking another person in the eyes, listening… These are things that I don’t know who I learned them from and when, but I I know that I learned it there with those people,” reflects Ricardo Gómez. Elena Rivera highlights the discipline that Alicia Hermida taught them. “As an adult, I was more aware and appreciated it more. “Sometimes I still hear Alicia Hermida in my head with the details she told us,” recalls the actress. “Film and television are things that happen on a grand scale, with a team writing, a production selling the idea and looking for budgets… and all that big ball ends up boiling down to the time and a half between the camera and you .” . We need to know how to isolate ourselves from everything that has brought us to this moment, but at the same time be aware of everything,” Gómez adds.
Carlos Alcántara (Ricardo Gómez) and Karina Saavedra (Elena Rivera) got married in “Cuéntame” in 2018.
None of them miss having experienced a different childhood (“I don’t know any childhood outside of Cuéntame, I don’t know how to compare it,” reflects Ricardo Gómez). Now they have their eyes set on the future and the present, having completed a major stage in the past. “I like to live in the present. I would like to get excited again about the courage that comes with going on stage in the theater, in the cinema I would like to do something that contributes to myself and continue to learn. But I don’t want to push for what I want to do. I’m all for being in the here and now,” Rivera says. “What Elena says is very difficult for me to apply because I live in the future and have a thousand things on my mind. All my energy is focused on the shoot I’m doing, but a lot of my mind is on a personal project. I hope to start my debut film as a director next year or early 2025. I put my energy into the projects that are happening in the present, but half of my head sleeps, eats breakfast and goes to bed with that thought in mind.”
As they talk, they recognize someone on the street: “It’s the deputy director of Cuéntame! This man was the one who said: “Thank you very much, we have finished Cuéntame,” they explain. This Wednesday the rest of Spain will be able to say the same: thank you everyone, we have finished Cuéntame.
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