No matter how near the end sits in view, it can still be hard to see it. For Jaime Lorente, he finally caught a glimpse of it on the last day of filming the final part of La Casa de Papel.
He was on set in the Bank of Spain, and he and the other members of La Banda were playing out the final sequences of a heist that started as a robbery and descended into an all-out war. They were exhausted, wrapping at around 4 am, which was normal for the show’s months-long production. There was blood on their jumpsuits, but you’d never know it.
In between takes, Lorente looked down at that now-iconic red jumpsuit, and then looked around at the other actors that he’d become so close to over the last five years. He pulled at the crimson cloth that covered him, and, one by one, they all did the same.
“We had been wearing these red jumpsuits for so long, and then in that moment we realized that it was the last time we would wear them,” Lorente tells Esquire Middle East.
Lorente never knew that a simple jumpsuit and a Salvador Dalí mask would end up meaning so much to him, nor did the rest of them. Five years earlier, it was simply the costume chosen for a new heist show that would premiere on Spain’s second-most popular TV station. It aired in 15 episodes from May to November of 2017, and it made some rumblings in Spain, but its resonance was supposed to stop there.
“There was a feeling of emptiness when we concluded. We had come to tell the story of robbery and we did it. It was hugely stressful to write those 15 episodes, 70 minutes long each, and shoot them in 5-6 months. In the end, I had a certain feeling of relief because I had never written or shot so fast,” says the show’s creator Alex Pina.
“We were very young, we had no money, and we had to shoot twice as many constant days, so while it was a relief to finish it, we felt that we had done something good. We felt it had contributed to the genre, blending the North American branch of the genre and the Anglo-Saxon literature of the perfect robbery, creating a hybrid with black comedy with romanticism, and then suddenly it was over.”
Interview: Money Heist creator Alex Pina on finding the right ending to La Casa de Papel
That was until Netflix picked it up worldwide, and without promotion, it quickly became a cult hit across the globe. In the Arabic-speaking world, especially Saudi Arabia, it became the biggest international hit the region had ever seen, with costumes popping up at seemingly every event in the Middle East, a devoted fandom posting non-stop on social media, and even Arabic-language covers of its signature song “Bella Ciao” hitting the music charts, over 100 years after the defiant anthem was first was sung in Northern Italy.
“A few months after it hit Netflix, I was shooting a movie on the Canary Islands. I was walking on this path nearby and within 300 meters, I was stopped like eight times. It was people from Poland, people from Belgium, from Argentina, people from the Middle East, and it was kind of amazing. And I get the same reaction all the time, a truly brilliant reaction,” says Álvaro Morte, who plays The Professor.
The plot of La Casa De Papel, known in English as Money Heist, is both novel and familiar. In the first two parts, a crew of career criminals, led remotely by the enigmatic Professor, take over the Royal Mint of Spain for a week, printing and getting away with over $1 billion.
While the storytelling of the show propelled it forward, it was the richness of the characters that made it resonate, each flawed and vivid in their own right.
When Morte first auditioned for the series, he misjudged the script, thinking that it was going to be a clone of Ocean’s Eleven, with him playing the show’s Danny Ocean. How wrong he was.
“I went in there doing a full George Clooney is my first audition. It was all self-confidence, and ‘Hey guys, we’re going to rock this and that’. We were doing that first classroom scene with me explaining the plan, and they stopped me and said, ‘Ok Álvaro, we like that very much, but we need you to find the freaky side of this guy.’ I was like, ‘The freaky what? Come on.’ But they explained to me that The Professor was the opposite of Superman,” Morte continues.
“With Superman, there’s two characters. There’s Superman, the real one, and then a second he invented, Clark Kent. With the Professor, we wanted him to be the opposite. He’s Clark Kent, but sometimes he has to behave like a Superman.”
The Professor, as broken and nerdy a character as he was, was inspired by the superhero world more broadly than just the Man of Steel’s alter ego, says Morte.
“He’s running the heist from a dark hanger, like Batman in his Batcave. He’s got a strange, mysterious past, like Wolverine from the X-Men. He’s connected to all of this, but he’s still special and weird. He’s a guy who has a difficult to express his feelings and relationships. He’s good at none of this, but still has a lot of charisma,” Morte continues.
He pauses to reflect.
“If that is enough to make some nerds in the world to feel a little bit like heroes at times, I’m really happy with that.”
But the show does not just belong to The Professor. In the gang of criminals were numerous characters that grab ahold of audiences, none more so than Berlin, played by Pedro Alonso, a character with magnetism and dark heart straight out of a Tarantino film, a heel you can’t take your eyes off, who commits unforgivable acts while somehow remaining sympathetic.
At the very end of the second part, Berlin sacrifices himself to save the team, a heroic act of redemption for a man who had selfishly caused so much pain. It was a tremendous end for the series, a cathartic moment that led to pure delight as the other characters escaped.
But it wouldn’t be the end, after all. In the months after the show’s Netflix debut, at the peak of its initial popularity, Alex Pina got a call he wasn’t expecting. It was from Netflix. They wanted more.
“Suddenly, Netflix called us and asked us if there was more story to tell. I said that while we had to end the second part this way, we do have more stories to tell and we believed that the story could reach a larger audience even if it was very local. In a way, it was an emotional sense of relief because while it was a lot of stress for us as writers, it helped us overcome a great sadness because we felt we had something to tell. Justice was served when Netflix called us,” says Pina.
There was one big problem—Berlin was dead, and Pina didn’t want to continue the show without Alonso. For parts three to five, Pina devised a plot that would be built around Berlin’s back story, a plan in which Berlin had planned his own heist while he was still alive that the Professor had felt was too dangerous to try at the time, but once backed into a corner, he would have no choice but to try to execute his dead brother’s plan.
Pina does not regret the decision he made to kill off Berlin. In fact, it helped the show become what it is now.
“We will always regret things, because we are constantly making a lot of snap decisions. We made the very big call to kill off a fundamental character in Berlin, and perhaps we wouldn’t have done the same had we known the show would continue. But actually, I think the series has worked well with the decisions we have made. I think you can always make bad decisions, but I regret nothing. In the end, the series is the sum of all your decisions, the good and the bad, and that’s your DNA,” says Pina.
Alonso was elated to find out the show would continue, but couldn’t hide his disappointment in knowing the story would go on without him in the main action. With those limitations, he and the writers found new dimensions for the character in the final parts of the show in his back story, allowing Berlin to become even more fully realized than he had been initially.
“In the first and second parts, I can say that I depicted dark character who represents risk and chaos at the same time. He is dead for the third and fourth season, so the question we ask ourselves, myself and the script writers, is what could we do? It gets a handicap because you lose the present tense of the action. So instead, we actually got to see this brighter side of Berlin in this third season when he’s coming back. But even that was difficult to sustain when he is no longer alive. In the fifth season, the script writers tried to merge both sides, the bright side and the dark side of the character,” says Alonso.
There may have been a brighter side to Berlin, but for the rest of the characters, seasons three and four took a much darker tone, with much of the playful spirit of the show gone and a more suffocating atmosphere creeping in more and more as the show heads towards its part five conclusion. No longer is the Professor one step ahead. Now, he is in over his head.
“The script writers were absolutely insatiable. At the beginning, they thought, ‘well, let’s make a heist story’. But that wasn’t enough. Then they said, ‘well, let’s make it a police story’. This wasn’t enough, either. And then the fifth season, they made it a war story. They try to find stimuli to make the characters fly. It’s an attempt at constant renewal, so that nothing ever gets stale,” says Alonso.
The decision to make the show darker and darker as it goes on has led to some of the series’ most shocking and heart-wrenching moments, punctuated by the death of Alba Flores’ character Nairobi, a brash yet compassionate thief with a daughter she yearned to be reunited with, one of the show’s most popular characters and widely considered the heart of the show, in the fourth part, released in 2020.
The move got Pina a lot of hate mail, he admits.
“There was a huge moment of anger. We certainly noticed it. The fans write us very angry messages, but even then I didn’t regret it,” says Pina.
For Pina, the death was essential, as it helps signal the show as a new way to make television in Spain, as well as the broader elevation of television as a storytelling medium on the whole.
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“15 years ago in Spain, the fiction genre was based on unwritten rules that you could never kill your protagonist. The viewer knew when he was facing a danger, for example, hanging from a rope that is slowly breaking, that you were not going to kill his character, because he had a guardian angel. In a way, television used to say, ‘no, calm down, this is just for you to live the emotion of death without death’,” says Pina.
“Now we are experiencing the emotion of death with death, and it is much more effervescent for the viewer to know that your character can die. There is greater anxiety in the viewer. We raise their levels of anguish and the journey they make by watching television is closer to a real journey, to real emotions. This is the great secret of why there are some series that create a fandom on the level of a phenomenon. It’s about how vividly you can bring them on that journey, and the journey of death is a cathartic journey. That is what pure drama is about.”
Those deaths don’t just affect the viewer, they also affect the performers, perhaps more than they let on. When Jaime Lorente’s character Denver loses his father Moscow in part 2, it was a painful moment for Jaime that he still has not fully recovered from, he admits us.
“I will be truthful with you. When I had to say goodbye Agustin Ramos who plays my father, I felt it as if I had lost my real father in real life. I had a wonderful relationship with him. That farewell was very difficult for me. It was the last day of shooting together for part two, and he’s been a person that has helped me a lot on an actor’s level, as well as a personal one. I shared many things with him, and it was very sad to say goodbye to him. I have continued to play on that pain throughout the rest of filming,” says Lorente.
These moments are often as surprising for the performers as they are for the audience, as Pina famously wrote the show as they filmed it, often watching the day’s footage to get new inspiration for the next day, morphing and changing the plot as they go.
“You have no idea what’s happening,” says Luka Peros, who plays Marseille, a member of La Banda who joins the show in part 3. “When you read it, you’re like, OK, maybe I die now. Will this character die, or will they kiss? And if they kiss, will a bomb go off immediately after? In this in this series, everything is possible. Many times they went in one direction and then weren’t happy with it, and filmed it again with those actors without telling the rest of us. Then you watch it later, and you say, wait, that wasn’t in the script. When did they think of that?”
In part five, that process of reworking the material as they went was more pronounced than ever before, as Pina and company got stuck on how to get to the ending they had planned, he reveals to Esquire Middle East.
“Usually what we know is the end. But in the case of the fifth part, what happened is, in the final chapters, we realized what we had designed didn’t really work and we had to radically change the last chapter. In other words, we changed everything we had in mind about how the robbery ended because it was not working for us. It took 33 versions to do it,” Pina reveals.
“It was a critical moment. After five parts and two robberies that made up more than two thousand minutes of fiction, we faced the fact that what we wanted to tell was not working. And that’s the reason why in the end we had to do a lot of versions and changed everything. Generally, we write as we record, so many times we know where the characters go, their arcs and we know the ending. But we write everything else on the spot, we discuss it as we go, and as we see how the series is turning out in post-production. But with the ending, we couldn’t rely on that process any longer,” he continues.
Here’s one mild spoiler for you, if you’ll forgive us: Don’t expect a carbon copy of the happy ending we got at the end of part 2. Pina and company, after a year of grueling work, found a conclusion that is wholly new, and, he believes, even more satisfying.
“I think we always had an idea or a fear, which is the fear that your series will wear out and will be devalued, as we continued to film more seasons. We always thought that we had to stop when the series was highly demanded, when it was still in its ‘golden age’. It seemed like that was just what we had to do with the series,” says Pina.
“I believe that the fifth season is the most brutal from any other we have done – for many reasons, mainly, due to the levels we came to harass the Professor’s band, our most radical limits are in this fifth season. Therefore, I believe that the anguish and anxiety of the viewer are also going to be at the limit in this last season. And this also allows us to blow everything up into big pieces, the things we had previously done allowed us to blow them up. It has really been difficult for us to finish it like this but, on the other hand, it is rewarding that the series is getting proper closure with its best season so far,” Pina continues.
The feeling of pride that Pina has in the final product, 10 episodes broken into two parts that took around 33 days to film per episode, is shared across the rest of his cast. Just as Lorente looked down at his blood-soaked red jumpsuit and realized he would never wear it again, each of the actors had their own moment when it finally sunk in that they would have to leave behind a show that meant so much to them.
“I finished at like 4:35 in the morning and went straight to the airport to return to Barcelona. I was just a dead body on the plane, but inside me I realized I had built up a lot of emotion that then hit me all at once. I sat there, exhausted, exultant, soaking in the entire experience. It was so hard to let go,” says Peros.
Pedro Alonso had no other cast members to lean on in his final scene. In his last day on set, he had to perform a monologue all by himself, which he delivered with the best energy he could find left inside him.
“When I finished, the rest of the cast and crew broke out into applause, and I fell deeply silent. As I stood there, a person gave me a letter expressing gratitude for what I had brought to the show, and as I stood there, letter in my hand, I entered an emotional crisis. For four full minutes, I couldn’t say a word. Then finally, I said to the room that If I try to say something more, I am going to break down, so I will only try to articulate a thank you. I thought to myself, wow, this is a serious moment in my life,” says Alonso.
“Afterwards, the other actors spoke to me and said that it helped them enter a state of emotional catharsis. There was a serious movement of energy for us, and we each had to leave something behind with this work. It was a serious piece of all of our lives, in the artistic, in the intimate, and in the professional,” says Alonso.
It is often hard to say goodbye. For Lorente, he couldn’t bring himself to say it at all.
“It’s something you just can’t do, right? It’s hard to even fathom of the implications of saying goodbye to something that is so big. Until you say goodbye, you don’t realize that there are some of your co-actors that you will never talk to again or maybe never see again. So, for me, it’s not really over until you say goodbye. That’s why I don’t plan to say it,” says Lorente.
Whether or not he’s ready to let go, Lorente is ready to admit one thing—this show changed his life, as surely it changed many others.
“On a personal level, on a professional level, my life is completely different now. And it’s all because of this show. I think that many of the things I do have been made possible by this show. I would have possibly had a much more normal life if it wasn’t for this. If you spend one day with me, you will realize how much this show has changed the person I am, for the better. I’m so grateful for what it has given me, and given all of us.”
Lorente is not ready to say goodbye. But perhaps, in its stead, he can muster one final refrain:
Bella, ciao.
Photographer: Monica Suarez de Tangil
Stylist: Sara Fernandez Castro
Hair and Make Up: Cynthia de Leon
Translation: Romina Román
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