Reno, Nevada, 1976. “Not a reporter came. What’s going on in this city? Don’t they have television?” asks the actor Jerónimo Bosia, who has recently landed in a destination which, by script, pretends to be the American city known for its casinos. It’s the first scene Ringo. glory and deathStar+ series with first on March 24thand the young man who in the fiction plays Oscar Natalio Bonavena, legend of Argentine boxing, wears a mustache and a lit cigar.
The sequence, recreated in Argentina and set in the same year of his untimely death, anticipates the decline of the 33-year-old idol, assassinated three months later by the mafia.
“Death in characters haunted me a lot. Ringo finished and I went to Spain to shoot a film (The Snow Company) on the tragedy of Los Andes”, links the young protagonist of the thriller which also goes back to the origin and milestones of the dizzying life of the champion and which will have seven chapters.
More than a year later, there is the face to face with Bosia without a mustache and in a fancy ring, mounted in a Buenos Aires hotel room. And that’s when the actor, with a history of first steps in Peruvian television and remembered for being the bad boy in One Hundred Days of Falling in Love, begins to piece together the ends that lead him right where he is.
know defeat
“I may not be Ringo’s age, but I know what defeat is”, clarifies in advance who, an expert in contact sports, is three-time national taekwondo champion and former South American champion.
“When I went to the Taekwondo World Championships in Spain, at the age of 17, I lost in my first fight to a Russian named Dimitri. He was a raised ring, with flags from all over the world and in the first chapter I came out as Ringo. I began to commit infractions, such as hitting him in the back due to impotence”, relives the actor whose face, a true carbon copy of the sample, is multiplied today even in the recreated stickers from the 1960s.
When I started acting I’ve always had the epic idea that one day my role would come. I wasn’t thinking so much about a career, but about fitting into a character. Then, from 2018, everyone started saying to me: “You look like Ringo”. And I didn’t know who he was,” he admits.
-Who told you?
-I was working on it one hundred days to fall in love and he told me Sebastian Ortega. Also that year the photographer Gabriel Machado photographed me characterizing it. And when I went to the casting for the series, I wanted to prove that I was up to the task and I thought: “Either I will be a joke or I will stay.” Luckily I stayed.
-The name of Rodrigo de la Serna was also circulating to play him in 2010, but in a film that was never made.
-Yes, there was a lot of comment that “Seba” Ortega wanted to do it with him and Bonavena would have done a great job. Even though I had to play someone older, he had a lot of faith in me. I was very confident in acting and doing this project directed by “Nico” (Nicolás Pérez Veiga) gave me more confidence than acting, with less. It was an intense. I even appreciated the pressure.
-When you were cast, it turned out you had gained weight on your own and it ended up being counterproductive for the role.
-Yes, I thought I would look more like Ringo with a more vintage body, something more Popeye. So I got fat, I went to the production meeting and they said, “No, we want to do a little bit more modern version.” They put me on a diet and I ended up doing the exact opposite. I usually weigh 85 kg, at that time I was about 96 years old and I lost 8 kg. Fortunately, physical activity has also helped a lot.
-Do you have any physical marks from the ring?
-Yes, because there are many fights where Ringo charges. He is a boy characterized by resistance; then she had to let me hit. I remember “Nico”, the director, saying to me: “Now you have to let your guard down” and I saw some bruises, which I was still willing to receive.
-Your past with taekwondo and kickboxing paved the way for you.
-Completely. I was first dan. In taekwondo I was a black belt and came out three times national champion, one time South American champion and I went to the World Taekwondo Championships in Spain, at 17, where I lost. Then I did a little bit more until I was 22 when I moved into acting.
Haven’t you thought about it before?
-Actually, I knew I wanted to make an artistic career. My mother is a plastic artist and the fascination for drawing really impressed me. I started studying Cartoon Animation, but I was very rough with technology. So I stopped and then mixed the two things that are art and the body a bit. I felt very good doing theater classes and I started “casting”.
Years without letting your guard down
Outside the ring, the real one and the fictitious one, the Saavedra boy has never let his guard down. Before going to the cinema (me, teenager), where he has already formed an acting duo with the actor Renato Quattordio, has tried his hand endlessly in projects for children and young people with no luck.
“The truth was not left. I’ve done a lot and it hasn’t stopped happening. The Disney talent scout, the same one who called me for Ringo’s casting, found my folder for having done so many auditions. Until one day, while I was in Bariloche, he wrote to me: “We have a casting for you”. Sounds a little cheesy, but I was in a little cabin that night, with my girlfriend sleeping, I grabbed a poncho and went out to look at the sky and the stars,” he comments.
-In “One Hundred Days of Falling in Love” (Telefe) you were another who took the world by storm, but to be the bad and provocative boy who bullied. Have you come to live with the famous stigma of galancito?
-Yes, it’s true that you always have to leave when out of nowhere they call you for a well-defined archetype. For example, people always think I play rugby and have never touched a ball. And they call you from the rugby papers. Or that “lay on your back” and all that…
-In your networks you play a bit with that, from sarcasm and humor.
-Yes, totally. Sometimes I know I can be heavy on networks…
Why are you very active?
-I publish many and very different things, but I don’t sell myself as a product. If I write or come up with something, I upload it.
-What do you mean by not selling yourself?
-I’m not trying to show, as everyone says, that in networks one shows the best of one. I won’t show you anything scary either, but I try to lay out everything I like to do besides acting, not just a defined profile. I like to draw, write, be funny, play sports and upload a little bit of everything.
And you are a good imitator.
-I started with that because I imitated my old lady’s friends who told me: “You have to do theater”. That’s when I started acting. Then I wanted to do something really raw, I wanted to challenge myself dramatically, and this role gave me the opportunity to explore all of that and more.
-Even Bonavena was a bit of a showman.
-Yes, being funny, the quarrels, they are all things that have to do with me. I In school I always wanted attention, to make a joke and was looking for the comment to make people laugh. This gave me problems as he was very restless and hyperactive.
-Did you often change schools?
-Yes, haha, I look? I didn’t like school, but at the same time taekwondo began to order me and gave me the regime. School taught me that life can be tough and taekwondo has disciplined me since the age of 7.
Bonavena’s family
-Unlike the Maradona series, which had its detractors, here they had a direct link with Bonavena’s relatives.
-Yes, I went to dinner at the restaurant that had his son Ringuito and it was crazy. In fact my aunt’s husband went to school with Ringuito’s son.
– What did you talk about?
-We drank some wine and he told me things I didn’t know. For example, that Ringo has brought many exotic pets and once brought a monkey into the house. And you have to keep a monkey at Parque Patricios…he Had eccentricities. His family also told me that physically they looked the same to me.
-Dismissing this specific case, I understand that the best compliment you can receive is to tell you that you look like Marlon Brando.
-Yes, I like it a lot. When I met the figure of Marlon Brando I went crazy, it was when I started studying acting at 18. . This gave me the courage to face what I wanted to achieve with acting. Later that admiration also changed to Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Did you hang up your gloves?
-Yes. That metaphor for me applies to when I went to the Taekwondo World Cup in Spain, in the city of Benidorm and lost in the first fight because I didn’t feel up to it. I put on my helmet and said, “what am I doing here?” We also had no money! And taekwondo is amateurish. We were supposed to do charity dinners, everything. My old man told me, “Go ahead, live it, because you’ve been doing it all your life and it doesn’t matter how it goes.”
And emphasizes: “After that experience I said: I will never hang up the gloves with the next thing I do and that’s what I decided to do with acting.”
-And you haven’t lowered your rod, because you come from filming a film about the tragedy of the Andes, which required more than a year of shooting.
-Yes, I had a piece of paper, a friend of Nando Parrado, Pancho Abal, who died the first night. But it was another kind of challenge. My character is a death and he was waging an epic death. All the haunted characters I’m loading. Term Ringo and I went to Spain to do it.
-And the experience of shooting so many meters high?
-We were in a ski center, locked up, cold and without much to do. It was a huge and tragic request to enter that place.
-You will be 27 before the series premiere on March 24th. What do you ask, assuming that a wish has already been granted?
I would ask for more stuff like that. I want more than this commitment, because I feel I have a lot to give and this has kept me busy. That’s where you feel like you’re floating, and I want to float.
Source: Clarin
