A few years ago, at the age of 60, Miguel Bosé (66 years old) started saying what he wanted. Social media served as a microphone and traditional media as speakers, analyzing and replicating his controversial denials about the pandemic and the coronavirus crisis. Then came several books in which he told his biography in the first person in a way he had never done before.
Returning to the media after the controversy, he reviews the various judgments he has faced in his past. First, his father condemned him when he announced that he wanted to be an artist instead of a businessman; when he wanted to be a bosé instead of Dominguín. He was also rejected by his record company when he wanted to stop being a teen pop star. And then he was punished by public opinion, led by the media, which kept making up that he died of AIDS. “And if he was addicted to drugs, what? Who cares? And if he was a fag, what? Who cares? It’s 1992. What does it matter?” he urged in the memorized interview with Mercedes Milá to silence the jokes and show that he was still alive.
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Bosé, the series which will premiere in Spain next Friday March 3rd, to coincide with the launch of the new SkyShowtime platform on Tuesday February 28th, addresses 30 years after the media opposed his relationship with drugs, protesting his heartbreak with men (women too) and how he survived those three sentences. As well as telling the story of how a musical legend was built, it’s the story of how his secret was born, from his childhood to his success with the Papitour tour in the mid-2000s, straining the love affair that has sustained them for a quarter of a century of this proverbial discretion.
Bosé’s parents and those of Macarena Rey, executive director of the production company Shine Iberia, which created the series, were friends. The personal bond that has connected both of them for decades favored the creation of this dramatized biography. “The interesting thing about this story is how little is known about Miguel’s true history,” says the Madrid-based producer over the phone. Rey wanted to “win back the disruptive, provocative and affectionate man” she knows. To make Bosé feel comfortable, he invited people close to the artist to meet with him and then develop the scripts for the series. They are Ángeles González-Sinde, writer, former Minister of Culture and former President of the Film Academy and a friend of her family, and Isabel Vázquez, who is close to her late niece Bimba. The showrunner is Nacho Faerna, Rey’s confidante who is in charge of the project.
José Pastor plays Miguel Bosé in the first chapter of the SkyShowtime series. Cecilia Bayonas
On several occasions, the singer has described his childhood as troubled and lonely, but this first season’s six episodes are an explosion of youthful urgency. It begins in the years when a twenty-something Bosé (played by José Pastor) became a movie star in Italy and made the leap into music. As the chapters tick by and the actor Iván Sánchez stays with the character, the pressure he receives from the press, his record label and his immediate environment dulls that flare-up, that spontaneity when it comes to loving and creating in his own way to show openly.
González-Sinde explains in a telematic conversation that “the viewer will see things that Miguel has done that will seem good to him and others that will not seem good to him”. “From a dramaturgical point of view, it makes no sense to tell a story against your protagonists. Not in their favor either. Both of those ways are always wrong,” Faerna continues. Those responsible for the script commented that it was the characters’ faults, “their pettiness and their struggles make them interesting.” The singer himself invited them to “contact people who probably wouldn’t speak well of him,” they explain.
We were aware that there is a deeper conflict in “Bosé” that is difficult to reflect on: the protagonist’s obstacles come from the same place where his privileges come from.
Nacho Faerna, executive producer of the series
The portrait of an artist and his time is completed by the screenwriters’ intense delving into “the gold of the newspaper library”, trying to shoot also in the same places where the events happened. This has enabled them to retain identical details to the real ones, even when they appear in a single sequence and the viewer cannot notice them. Bosé, with an extensive acting career, understood upon seeing the end result that the show’s creators needed enough freedom to dramatize the many situations addressed.
For the creative team, “It was important to place each chapter in a historical context,” says González-Sinde. The discography of its protagonist allowed it. Linda, I will love you (possibly dedicated to her mother), Salamandra, And if you don’t come back (which she composed introducing herself the day her father died)…each episode borrows from hers title of one of their themes, to put the action and the viewer into the continuous jumps in time. “A stanza of a letter, a bar, or the rhythm of a song could open the way to following a new narrative line,” says Vázquez.
The team responsible for the scripts faithfully reconstructs their moments on stage and imagines the dialogues spoken behind the scenes. One of the most meticulous is his official presentation as a singer at Florida Park in Madrid in 1977 in front of the cameras of the television show José María Íñigo. But the public found neither a new Julio Iglesias nor a new Raphael. The musician appeared in a blue that was as electric as his choreographies, a far cry from the usual image of a Spanish crooner wearing a suit, tie and melodious singing. At the end of the evening, the singer managed to transform Luis Miguel Dominguín and Lucía Bosé, who both sat in the front row, from legends of bullfighting and cinema to the parents of Miguel Bosé.
Iván Sánchez as Miguel Bosé in Shine Iberia. Cecilia Bayonas
victim of his parents
The lives of the myths resemble each other. Kronos is the Titan in classical Greek culture who, persuaded by his mother Gaia, manages to overthrow his authoritarian father Urano by castrating him with a sickle so that once he is in power he will be like him. The Bosé of youth, in love with his mother Lucía and thanks to her linked to the culture and radicalism of the Italian political left, in his maturity empathizes with Luis Miguel Dominguín, an icon of Francoism. In the series, the son is allowed to reproduce the father’s customs and sayings. “Until now there hasn’t been that much emphasis in the true bond they both shared throughout their lives. Their relationship has almost always been analyzed by prejudice and an assumption of watertight roles we want to land. We will show situations that many of us recognize ourselves in,” says Vázquez. The series also ends as a declaration of love for the actress and the bullfighter.
For Macarena Rey, the Panamanian-born artist is partly a victim of both. The producer isn’t just referring to the fame of the unlikely couple who starred in an impossible marriage and divorce. It also mentions the connection between two overwhelming personalities. “They were egomaniacs and often thought more of themselves than their children. But all parents do what they can, not what they should,” he says. This emotional triangle is the other major arc of the story. “Since he was young, due to his parents’ divorce, Miguel has taken on a lot of responsibility for the family,” says González-Sinde. And this tension about “how to be who you want to be without sacrificing the expectations that others have of you” gives the character an unusual richness, the author continues.
“We were very aware that there is a deeper conflict in Bosé that is more difficult to reflect on than in other stories about the rise to success: his protagonist’s obstacles come from the same place where his privileges come from. We show a Miguel dealing with what psychologists call an abundance crisis with the best cards of his life. But he’s someone with ambition and a perfectionist who doesn’t look for the easiest options,” defends Faerna.
The planned second season of this fiction, which will include a further six chapters, will delve deeper into his childhood and his relationship with Picasso. As is the four-episode documentary series created by Shine Iberia itself, which Movistar Plus+ will premiere later this year and which, in the words of Macarena Rey, will “conclude Miguel Bosé’s declaration”.
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