At the Urso hotel in Madrid the movement of journalists repeated itself throughout the morning. There are probably more people in the bar than usual: there are several groups of fans of the actor William Levy, who have been waiting for hours for the day of promotion of the series. Road to Arcadia it’s over and they will be able, with a little luck, to talk to him. He is not alone in his new project: he is accompanied by the actress, content creator and designer Paula Echevarría (Candás, Asturias, 48 years old), who returns to the screen as a performer six years after her last project, Velvet collectionconcluded in 2019. “Has it been six years? It seems like yesterday”, he asks with some curiosity before starting the interview with EL PAÍS.
He is enthusiastic about the beginning of a professional phase that he interrupted by his own decision. This November 10th the SkyShowtime series debuts in which she gives life to the character of Irene, the Cuban actor’s partner: “She is like a ray of light. She is an exuberant, loving and protective girl towards what belongs to her”. The recordings took place last year in the Canary Islands, a stop he remembers with “very fondness”: “At this point in my life, if you give me the choice between a fantastic project and a project where I’m very happy… The personal matters a lot, and this one has both.”
But why did it take six years to return? “It wasn’t a plan. It was for the moment, I needed a break in my life. It wasn’t a break from work, it was a break acting. I had all that work covered, I was well off financially and I felt fulfilled because I was still working. That’s why I could afford to wait for the moment to come,” he acknowledges. But one day she understood that it was the opportunity to return to the screens: “My body asked for it. All these jobs (as a creator of content and brand image) make me very happy, fulfill me and I enjoy it, but I needed to go back to the origins a bit.”
More than two decades ago he began his successful career in series such as The commissioner, Gran Reserva AND velvet. “I never want to be without fiction,” he says of his return. But he knows that this decision also implies changes in his daily life. “It takes a long time, your life stops being yours and it belongs to the filming, to a team, plans change from day to day, there are a lot of hours including travel. You start to belong to that project a little bit and it got ingrained in me a little bit. It drove me crazy to think about disappearing from my house, but there came a time when I felt like I could come back.”
Since 2019 he has focused on other professional aspects. “The first part (of the break) was forced by the pandemic and the pregnancy. I am not a pregnant woman who can work, I cannot hide it from the second month. Then it was a personal decision,” explains Echevarría, who welcomed her second child in 2021. “I have been chaining one thing to another for many years. At that moment I felt that my body was asking me and my head was telling me that I had to be there, that I had a newborn baby and a daughter who had entered adolescence due to great door and I needed to be home.
Coinciding with the premiere of Road to ArcadiaEchevarría begins recording a new Atresmedia series: “The scales are there for everything: in a relationship, in work… Good must always prevail over evil. If you don’t want to be happy, it’s better not to. Now I embark on another project where the scales are very, very in favor.” He also knows that accepting this type of proposal involves a sacrifice. “This month has been impossible to manage. When I’m not filming, I try to do all those jobs so that my absence isn’t noticed at home: during school hours, shootings in the morning; I try to pick them up or pick them up from school and come home at a reasonable time so I can be with my daughter, help her with her studies or manage her head, and I play with my son. Now I’ll be gone again, but hey, that’s what father figures are for,” he says.
The actress has two children: Daniella, 17 years old, the result of her marriage to the singer David Bustamante, and Miki, four, born from her relationship with the former footballer Miguel Torres and current competitor of MasterChef celebrities. The boy, as he explains, still doesn’t know that his parents are famous: “He sees us on television like someone sees Pocoyo. The same thing happened to my daughter. She’s always seen us on TV, but she’s never seen it as something exceptional. She started to realize it when her friends started telling her about it or sending her photos.” On the verge of coming of age, her firstborn posed with her for the first time on a red carpet last June. Despite being the daughter of two very popular faces in Spain, she has managed to maintain a discreet profile all this time: “I don’t talk about her because she is enough of a person to decide what she wants or doesn’t want to tell about her life. I will only tell you that, as a mother, I am very proud and that I love her madly.” Every time she appears in public, it is by her own decision: “If there is a photo with her on Instagram, it is because she has decided that it is like this. And when you don’t see it, it is because she has decided that it is like this.”
He recognizes that in these more than twenty years of profession nothing has remained the same as it was at the beginning. She was one of the first Spanish actresses who also began acting in advertising campaigns, and she didn’t mind being reported for that leap: “When I started doing advertising, and other things, in my profession this was very much frowned upon. You were less of an actress because you were public. Today everyone does it and time has proven me right. I have always cared little about what others thought of me.” He maintains this even now, when it is easier to send comments of all kinds (good and bad) to public figures through social networks: “It says more about whoever says it than about me. “I always think so.”
She was also a pioneer on Instagram, where she currently has 3.7 million followers. For years now, his profile on social networks has become a small showcase in which he shows his projects, his campaigns, his thoughts and some glimpses of his private life. It may seem like everything has been a bed of roses for her, but she says that fame has weighed on her at some points in her life, although she doesn’t specify which ones. Now she controls the narrative of what is said. “We are the ones who expose ourselves. On the networks, you run the show. Years ago it wasn’t like this: I didn’t decide to expose myself and the media that were at my doorstep, at my work door, in the park… It wasn’t my decision”, he complains.
There were times, he says, when he wanted to disappear and “be invisible.” Now she knows what the limits of social networks are and when she has to stop: “There are things I want to keep to myself. Not because they can’t be taught. I’m super proud of my kids, proud of my boyfriend… I would spend all day recording them. In fact, I spend all day recording them. But for me. There’s no need to expose everything.” “Life has to be taught to a certain extent because otherwise all kinds of mysteries are broken.” So discard the idea of a reality family. Paula Echevarría has other dreams to realize and goals to achieve, even if she always allows herself to be surprised: “I hope that life puts opportunities in front of me and I will see if it is the time to realize them or not”.
