The Atresplayer series The route It won a handful of awards and critical praise a couple of seasons ago. Set in the 1980s and 1990s and told in reverse (each chapter focused on what had happened to the same group of characters a year earlier), it showed the origins of The Bakalao Route as a cultural movement full of effervescence and creativity. The story “ended” (even though that moment was broadcast in its first chapter) with one of its characters, the tormented Marc Ribó, taking a flight to Ibiza to become a DJ of fame. What followed was the origin of things, the reconstruction of the intense relationship with his adoptive brother and his friends.
The unexpected second season of the series, The path vol. 2: Ibizaonce again uses a narrative twist to give new life to a story that seemed finished. This time, its chapters take place in two parallel timelines. On the one hand, Marc’s adventure continues, already settled in his new life and with his dreams realized just as Ibiza is preparing to become the world capital of leisure. On the other hand, it tells the story of his biological parents when they arrive on that same island 25 years earlier, at a crucial moment in their lives and in the history of Spain. The place was an oasis of freedom at the end of the Franco regime. This is the Ibiza that Marc’s parents knew a few months before they died in the famous Caravelle plane crash in 1972.
Next Sunday the sixth and final chapter will be launched on the Atresmedia platform, which launches an interpretative challenge to Àlex Monner and Irene Escolar. Each of the four actors plays two different characters (father and son and mother and daughter) in a drama that delves into issues such as identity and parent-child relationships.
Àlex Monner: Marc and Manuel
The 30-year-old Barcelona actor plays Marc Ribó in the 1990s, a young man with his whole future ahead of him in a place that is about to reach its maximum potential. But despite his apparent success, something is wrong in his life. That feeling of permanent dissatisfaction, of living a borrowed life, is connected to his past, narrated in the first season of the series.
Monner also plays Manuel, Marc’s father, in the plot corresponding to the seventies. This is a man who is a child of his time, but with enough initiative and ambition to seek a better future. For this reason he is committed to building a hotel on the effervescent island in record time. The Catalan actor found himself facing a new plot, that of late-Franco developmentalist Spain, which “had a less naturalistic edge than the one the series had accustomed us to”, he underlines.
“In Marc’s case, it meant returning to a character that I already knew, that I had already built in the first season and that I wanted to meet again,” the actor tells EL PAÍS. “The arrival of the 1970s storyline opened up the possibilities for a series that was totally different in every way.”
“I remember recording scenes like Manuel talking to seven-year-old Marc and those moments were reflected in the way the Marc I played in the nineties experienced certain things. It’s a rare situation and an opportunity that an actor rarely has,” celebrates Monner. “Marc is a shitty pimp, but that’s what I liked best about playing him.”
Carla Diaz: Vicky
Carla Díaz, a 27-year-old godmother, joins the series playing Vicky, Marc’s girlfriend, in the 1990s. She is a young woman who moves to Ibiza in search of a more prosperous life. When you meet the DJ, He finds a way to make his dreams come true, but also a person he connects with deeply, feeling as lost as he is. And then she announces that she is pregnant. “From that moment I worked on the character, someone who sees Marc as the Prince Charming who has come to save her,” says the actress.
Àlex Monner sees Vicky as the blue princess of Marc’s character. “He’s a disenchanted character, rotten inside. And then Vicky comes along with the possibility of a new life and gives him some light,” says the actor.
“Vicky was already a born survivor before what we see in the series, but becoming pregnant makes her doubly so, for herself and for her son,” Díaz reveals. “Many times you join a project where you don’t know how it will end. But in the case of The route I already knew it would be good because I was a fan of the first season,” explains the actress.
Irene Escolar: Violeta and Olivia
If the first season of The route It is told through music, the latter does so through architecture. Violeta, daughter of the Catalan counterculture and fan of Janis Joplin, moves to Instant City, an inflatable city in Ibiza created to host the students of the International Design Congress to which hippies have arrived from all over the world to protest against the hotel mastodons that are starting to take over the place. In the meantime they experiment with sex and drugs. When she meets Leo, Marc’s mother, the two connect almost immediately.
“I think it’s beautiful that on the screen there is such an ambivalent relationship between two women, that there is so much seduction and at the same time curiosity and at the same time need. It’s not so common to see it,” says Irene Escolar (Madrid, 37 years old).
Escolar also plays Olivia, Violeta’s daughter, in the 1990s storyline. His feelings on approaching two related characters were similar to those of Álex Monner. “It was more complicated than normal. Because you basically had to build two characters, but in one storyline I worked with a girl who would become me when I grew up. And the girl had incredible intuition, and when I saw her work, I realized that when I built the old Olivia, there were things from her work that needed to be there.”
Marina Salas: Leo
Marina Salas, 37 years old from Barcelona, is Leo, Marc’s mother, in the seventies. When she arrives in Ibiza to accompany her husband, she meets a girl, Olivia, and thus meets her mother, Violeta, whose hippie ideas make her rethink her life. Although both women appear to be antagonists, they are actually not. “Leo is a woman who is constantly questioned, by her husband and by the rest of the world. But not by Violeta”, says Leo’s interpreter.
“It’s very beautiful to see motherhood from these two points of view and such different lives in the same context. It reflects what it was like to be a woman at that time and the possibilities of what I could really see,” says the actress. “In this second season, the double meaning of the series title becomes even clearer. The characters have a marked path from which they want to escape.”
But the relationship between the two women is mutual. And Leo also influences Violeta. “There is something in Violeta’s story that breaks when Leo appears,” anticipates Irene Escolar. “This change in Violeta is very interesting to then understand Olivia,” adds Salas.
