Estefanía Piñeres and Delirio, the new Netflix series: "My mom is going to hate me saying this, but I love saying I'm a bastard."

Estefanía Piñeres was 17 when she decided acting wasn't going to be a part of her life. She was a shy, quiet teenager, a literature fanatic, who had come to Los Angeles intending to pursue the dream she'd discovered a couple of years earlier in her theater classes. She was in love with that feeling that occurs when the curtain is about to open and adrenaline rushes through her blood, and she thought she was ready to feel the same, but in front of the cameras. Perhaps she was guilty of teenage naiveté: she wanted to be "discovered," for someone to say she was the ideal actress for a Hollywood blockbuster.

When she entered the waiting room for a casting call she'd been interested in, she saw 25 women practically identical to her: templates for a pre-established character. And she decided to turn around, pack her bags, and return to Colombia to study advertising. “It was my coming-of-age experience,” she says. “I understood that this profession was a business, not fun. I was in a city with several million inhabitants, about half of whom were actors, and I accepted that there was a very good chance I would never become an actress, and that there was nothing wrong with that.”

After starring in Malta, a deeply intimate film in which she played a young woman working in a call center who wanted to escape her everyday reality, Estefanía Piñeres was chosen to play Agustina Londoño in Delirio, the new Netflix series based on the novel by Laura Restrepo. She will play the woman who loses her sanity when she's left home alone during her husband's trip, a character who epitomizes questions about the social meaning of madness and who experiences firsthand various forms of domestic violence, the kind that are so veiled in Colombian society. For Estefanía, this is exciting. If anything characterizes her career, which has ranged from acting to audiovisual writing, film and series production, and film directing, it's her interest in other people's stories: "My emotional connection to this profession comes from an interest in finding more nuances in the world," she says. "For me, the emotional benefit of being an actress is that: that no one seems like a stranger to me."

She was born in Cartagena in 1991. She is the daughter of a single mother, Milly, a strong-willed, strong-willed woman who taught her to windsurf, to see unconditional friends as part of the family, and to let her emotions carry her. When Estefanía was 10 years old, she went with her to Valencia, Venezuela, and became an avid reader thanks to a teacher who introduced her to the works of Kafka, Borges, and Cortázar. His name was Augusto Bracho; he wrote plays in his spare time and was the first person to tell Estefanía she should be an actress.

Today, at 34, Piñeres has consolidated a solid career in film, series, and television. It's a place where she feels comfortable: her more introverted and rational side has managed to focus on writing, and her creative drive has led her to create independent animation and film projects. Her drive to experience other people's stories and discover empathy with the outside world has led her to act with directors such as Carlos Gaviria (in the short film Las buenas intenciones, part of a project directed by Gael García Bernal), Natalia Santa (in the film Malta), Felipe Martínez (in the films Malcriados, for which she was nominated for Best Supporting Actress at the Macondo Awards, and Fortuna Lake), and Mateo Stivelberg (in the series Las Villamizar).

She also founded Letrario, her own creative laboratory, and has completed projects that are still in production: the two most important are Mu-Ki-Ra, an animated short inspired by the culture of Chocó that was part of the audiovisual market at the Cannes Film Festival, and Los malditos, her first feature film, which was part of the creative incubator at the Turin Film Festival. The next few months will be intense for her: she will have a role in the second season of One Hundred Years of Solitude, where she will work again with Carlos Gaviria.

In the photography studio, AC/DC's Highway to Hell is playing. Estefanía, wearing high heels and a dress in earthy colors that reproduce geological patterns, hums the song while they review the images. In front of the camera, she reveals a deep and mysterious gaze, which becomes transparent and calm during pauses. Even shy. Then, when the session is over, she asks not to be shown the photos: she is patient and prefers to trust the work of others. Letting go and not being in control is something she has learned over the years in an industry where teamwork is the norm.

This is Estefanía Piñeres: a woman who found in the audiovisual industry the opportunity to combine her instinct to be an actress with her interest in understanding—and narrating—the world of others.

What does it mean to you to have worked on a story as special to Colombian literature as Laura Restrepo's Delirio?

I must have read Delirium when I was about 20, when I returned to Colombia. I found the inner noise of thought Restrepo presents to be beautiful, and of course, also the social x-ray he painted. The novel examined violence, but from a different perspective, that of domestic violence. I also found the way the metaphor of delirium was used to pose the question of who is crazy to be very beautiful: Is Agustina crazy for wanting to live honestly? Or is the environment crazy?

The character you play, Agustina Londoño, also allows us to think about what family means to a society like Colombia's.

It's strange. I have a family structure that isn't what society supposedly dictates: I'm the only child of a single mother. The first time I read it, I asked myself many questions about what that structural imposition had meant for me, but now the questions were about something else. I focused, for example, on the mechanisms of concealment. I have a very large cultural distance from the book because I'm from Cartagena and grew up in Venezuela, but the novel is profoundly Bogotá: while on the coast, humor, the snideness, is one of the most used mechanisms of concealment, in Bogotá, on the other hand, the important thing is silence and maintaining appearances. I find it beautiful that this happens in the interior, because it's not just about the interior of the country, but because everything happens inside, on an individual, intimate level, not a collective one.

Did you ever want to contact Laura Restrepo to delve deeper into the character?

I don't know if it was because I was shy, respectful, or afraid, but no, I didn't. It could also have been due to lack of time: I arrived late, and the pre-production process was very short. I actually read the scripts, and there was a process of debating and discussing with the other actors and directors how to approach certain things. In those cases, I prefer to let myself be carried away by the process, which I enjoy, because when I feel in good hands, I like to trust and surrender to the team. I don't look for answers outside, but inside.

Have you always approached your work as an actress this way?

Yes. Since I'm a supremely rational person, acting, for me, is very unnatural. At the beginning of my career, it was incredibly uncomfortable, so much so that if I'd had the choice, I wouldn't have been an actress. It makes me very sad. However, there's a much more powerful force that drives me to detach myself from all that. I always do very deep table work at the beginning, but then I try to free myself, and to do that, I turn to my scene partners to find out what's going on there, what my body is saying, which is usually something very different from what I thought it was going to say. Surrendering to these discoveries is the most fun part of being an actress, a profession that is very visceral, instinctive. That's what I try to do: trust so I can surrender to instinct.

You've been working in the audiovisual industry for over ten years on independent film projects: you've been a producer, screenwriter, and director. What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing it all, which is so common in this field?

Well, I think we're going through a moment where this is more legitimate for actors. There was a time when actors could only dedicate themselves to that, and making the leap to working behind the camera wasn't very well-regarded. Even I felt the same way at first. They said, 'How are we going to hire her if she's the actress?' But little by little, actors who wrote and produced began to appear in other countries, and this has become increasingly common lately: Childish Gambino [Donald Glover] with Atlanta, or Phoebe Waller-Bridge with Killing Eve. It's easier to cross that invisible line. Now, leaving actors aside, I do think that line doesn't exist: normally everyone has done everything, also because in film school they make you go through all the trades.

Of course: we actors weren't professionally trained. Most of us came to acting as if by parachute and jumped onto the set. Most of the people I worked with knew how to do photography and sound, understood how it worked. But not me; I wrote stories.

I heard you fell in love with acting during a time you spent in South Dakota, when you auditioned for a theater class. What was it that drew you in? Why were you so determined that this was your path?

I'm going to tell you something crazy. I had just graduated from high school in Venezuela and had a scholarship to go study in Monterrey. I had never acted before. And after that class, I wrote to my mom and told her I was going to give up on the scholarship, that I wanted to be an actress. My mom freaked out because we didn't have any close references to what it means to make this a profession, a way of living and earning a living, but she supported me and ended up sending me to study in Los Angeles.

But what was that powerful thing that happened in that audition?

I really don't know what to say. The memories aren't there, or they're already too permeated by how I told that story. I wrote that email after only reciting a minute-and-a-half monologue, and I don't even remember which monologue it was. I only remember being on stage with four people in front of me, the lights, the nerves, feeling paralyzed, having a terrible time, and saying, "I want this for life."

How was your experience in Los Angeles?

I had a great time and a very bad time. I was very young, and it was a reality check: a city of millions of people, more than half of whom are actors working in whatever field, and where there are 800,000 girls who look just like you, but prettier, who do pole dancing, speak 16 languages, and are highly educated. It was super fun and super instructive: maybe I'm romanticizing it now, but I feel like I went with those expectations of those of us who grew up in the 90s, with this idea that we were unique and needed to be discovered.

And her mom has always been there to support her…

My mother is an extremely pragmatic person because life demanded it of her, but she was also a woman very aware of the joys of small things. She had very big emotions: I remember sometimes we were driving in Cartagena, and when the sky began to turn that pink-orange that is so striking on the coast at sunset, she would start shouting: "Thank you!" I had a very privileged childhood. My mother was a hotel manager; I spent my time in Cartagena, or on the Rosario Islands, windsurfing or in the ocean. She had several jobs and was focused on solving problems. When we lived in Venezuela, for example, she managed to gather my friends' families around us, and we made friends who became our family: we took turns having lunch at home or picking people up from school, always with unconditional solidarity. I know it was very hard for her, but I was very happy, and in the context we were in, we never needed more.

Is Piñeres your mother's surname?

No, my mom's name is Duque. My last name is my dad's, with whom I have no relationship. I mean, I know him, he knows who I am and all that, but my mom raised me, and she always carried that responsibility. My last name is more of an aesthetic gesture. My mom will hate it when I say this, but I love saying I'm a bastard. We need to redefine that word!

Redefine it in what sense?

People see it as an insult, but the traditional family structure in Colombia almost never exists: almost all of us have families that are far from that structure, and I think it's perfectly fine to call things by their name calmly. It's not about redefining the word, but rather the meaning of the word. I understand that for my mother it was an insult to be called a bastard, but I don't find it insulting. I'm not ashamed of it.

After that break from acting after returning from Los Angeles, you decided to join a training project organized by RCN and the Sena (National Seminary of Music). Who were your mentors?

It was a beautiful project. It was called the Center for Actoral Realization (CREA): they found the most theatrical and nerdy people and gave them the opportunity to set up a school. Maia Landaburu taught history and the literary side, Bernardo García was the body coach, and Manolo Orjuela brought everything together and staged the scenes with us. And it was all led by Diego León Hoyos: four theater experts teaching acting for television. I was part of the first group, and it was a privilege. We staged Chekhov, Shakespeare, Brecht, 15th-century Italian comedy, and we reenacted film monologues or scenes from 1990s television, which was incredibly interesting. I learned a lot, and it was a privilege.

Another of your facets is as a screenwriter, how did you get into writing?

I took a writers' workshop at the Central University, but before that, my interest in writing came simply from books, a much more literary endeavor, and I had never made the mental leap to writing for audiovisual formats. Until one day, several friends told me: it was a lean time, I'd been out of work for months, and I make a living from this; I'm not anyone's heir. And Carolina Cuervo was one of those who recommended it to me: "Start writing something." And I found mentors along the way, like Caro and Pipe [Felipe Martínez], who nurtured me and shared their knowledge. Later, I started developing my own projects, and the truth is, the Film Development Fund has been fundamental for me. After the calls for proposals, I began to develop a viable path. And now I'm not just thinking about writing for myself, but for others.

How do you feel better: as an actress or as a writer?

I love both; they're part of who I am. However, I have to say, there's a very clear aesthetic violence against women in this industry, and for actresses, there's a shelf life that has an expiration date: very few, and very tough ones, remain relevant at that age, but most end up going into exile. When I decided to become a writer, I also reflected on where to build and what alternatives there are; because I love this, I love writing. Not only has it become a lifeline, but, like acting, it's always been inevitable: I ended up writing out of reflex, because I needed to.

One of your first professional experiences was with Carlos Gaviria and Gael García Bernal. What was it like, fresh out of school, working with such iconic figures?

It was very special. They were the first to choose me for something. I've often gone through moments where I question whether I'm really cut out for this, whether I'm even a good actress. At the time, I had just graduated in advertising and thought what I should do was send out resumes to an agency, but they called me from CREA, where I had studied acting, to propose a casting call. Three days later, Carlos Gaviria called to tell me I was cast in his short film, which was part of an Inter-American Development Bank project on school dropouts in Latin America and the armed conflict in Colombia. I never spoke to Gael García; he was like the creative director of the project, but Carlos brought everything down to earth. I remember that on the day of the only rehearsal we had, I lost my voice, but Carlos was smart enough to walk past me quickly, whispering, "No problem, we'll shoot tomorrow." That confidence he instilled in me was key. He's a monster; we need him to win an award soon.

There are two other directors who have greatly influenced your career. One is Felipe Martínez…

Yes, Pipe and I met because he was making a film called Malcriados. I was just starting to write, making my first efforts, and his production company told me: "There's a small character, but we'd like an actress to play it." I said yes, right away, and it was a transformative experience because I had complete peace of mind to work on it: even though it was a small character, I realized that Pipe wanted to find something within the character, and beyond just doing two scenes, he worked hard with me, as an actress. We had super chemistry working together because he proposes a conversation through play and exploration. Along with Carolina Cuervo, he was one of my first mentors.

And the other is Natalia Santa, the director of Malta.

Natalia is the most wonderful thing there is, I can't say any other phrase. She's a brilliant and absolutely sensitive person. She was also the first director to direct me on a full project, and she left a lasting impression on me because, in a profession where everyone bluffs, she was able to come on set and say, "I don't know." Honestly, I had never heard anyone say "I don't know," especially because sets are very masculine, competitive spaces, with a kind of "I can do it" energy. But Nata led from vulnerability and questioning; she allowed herself to be fragile, and that changed the dynamic. For me, that example, leading from doubt, became a mantra.

Have you applied this to The Damned, your first film as a writer and director, which is currently in production?

We're working on it, but yes. I think I was once a person who wanted to know everything, who wanted to be intelligent and know a lot of things, but over the years I've gone backwards, in the opposite pursuit: I increasingly want to know less and ask more questions. Today, at least I know I'm a person who finds it easier to say "I don't know" and tell my team I need help. That's the beautiful thing about the collective nature of audiovisual creation, and it takes a lot of weight off our shoulders: a film is a 40,000-ton mammoth, and carrying it alone, which is what I've been doing for a long time, is very heavy. How do we all carry that mammoth?

Another key project for you is Mu-Ki-Ra, an animated musical film inspired by Chocó, about a girl searching for her brother, who's trapped by a monster made of vegetation. Where did that story come from?

I believe there are two types of sensitivity. There are people like Natalia Santa, the director of Malta, who have a curiosity for aesthetic beauty, for intimate stories. In my case, I think my creative drive is more outward-looking; my eyes are focused on questions I ask myself about others… And that's also very much in line with the meaning I find in acting, isn't it? I had a relationship with a foundation that worked in Quibdó and unfortunately no longer exists. It was called Marajuera. During that exchange, I met several children from that area and decided to turn the questions that arose into this project: about otherness, about prejudice, about feeling alienated from reality, and the challenges of reaching out to others. It's also a project deeply influenced by my way of seeing the world in terms of my relationship with nature: I'm somewhat pantheistic; I have this feeling that everything is sacred, and that leads to a concern about the environment. It's been going on for many years, and I think it will succeed in conveying those concerns about what surrounds us, about how to narrate nature and traverse it through that place of recognizing the other, the one who is different from me.

Why do you describe yourself as pantheistic?

I say that when the Ten Commandments were published, we misread the one that said you shouldn't harm your neighbor. People interpreted neighbor as the other human, but I think this is a much broader thing and that neighbor isn't reserved only for our species. I'm not very keen on doctrines in general; dogmas are a real struggle for me, but I think in this case it's Disney's fault: since I was raised by Disney, and in Disney movies, the beetle, the fish, the clocks, the cups speak—well, faggot, for me everything has a life! Now I say it's pantheism, but in reality, I'm re-mature and raised by Disney.

You recently married another artist, musician Juan Pablo Vega. What is your relationship like?

I don't know if everyone says this just to get on their husband's good side, but for me it's a profoundly honest answer: although we're both very serene people, he has increased my sense of calm. With him, I've learned the importance of silence: he's a man who doesn't have to express all his opinions, and for me, as someone who always likes to debate, it's been very valuable, because sometimes opinions contribute and sometimes they don't. He's also taught me to be suspicious of intellectuality and the medals that intellectuals hang on their shoulders, and for me, who's always wanted to know everything, this has unhinged me in a very beautiful way. For example, when one of those criticisms comes up that becomes super popular, like "we all hate this artist," he's suspicious of it and asks: "Why? Why do we hate him if he's able to connect with so many people?" That's what I admire most about him.

In your near future is your participation as an actress in the new season of One Hundred Years of Solitude. What's next for you?

As a screenwriter, I've been working on Dynamo, which has been a wonderful process that Natalia Santa somewhat drew me into. And, of course, I'm excited to continue advancing and expanding my acting process on something as grand as One Hundred Years of Solitude, working with Laura Mora, the director of that project, who is someone I greatly admire; and on Juanse, a film I recently shot and written and directed by Andrés Burgos, the screenwriter and showrunner of Delirio, who is another person I love working with. It's very exciting.