The myth of romantic love is present in all romantic comedies from the birth of the genre in the 1930s to the most famous titles of the 1990s and 2000s that we all grew up with and that, however, they do not represent everyone. And that is something that Guillem Clua has wanted to change. He did it ten years ago with the play that he now adapts in the series ‘Smiley’ that can be seen on Netflix from December 7. “There are no LGTBI romantic comedies and that is where the need for Guillem (Clua) to tell this story arises. He is a great fan of the genre but all the references he had were heterosexual characters,” explains Miki Esparbé.
The actor of ‘Kings of the Night’ is Bruno, one of the protagonists of ‘Smiley’. The other is Álex and the person who gives life to him is the actor Carlos Cuevas, known for his role in ‘Merlí’. From AhoraQuéSerie we have been able to chat with the three of them about love, suffering and references. The eight-episode series coming to Netflix is an adaptation of Guillem Clua’s play that Albert Triola and Ramón Pujol starred in touring all of Spain. The text has also traveled beyond the borders thanks to its translation into numerous languages. Definitely “a great trip” for something Clua tells us started as a joke: “The work arose from a conversation with a group of friends about my sentimental life and began in a room of 40 locations.” And from there it has become a series that will reach more than 190 countries. Clua confesses that with the call from Netflix “her head exploded” because with the success of the work she already believed that “she had reached the maximum of what Smiley could give.” But he was wrong and there was so much more.
Álex and Bruno are the protagonists of the series, they couldn’t be more different and it would have been highly unlikely that they would meet if it weren’t for the message that Álex mistakenly leaves on Bruno’s voicemail when he misdialed a number from the landline of the bar where he works in Barcelona. And around that bar and also the architecture studio where Bruno works is where all the love and heartbreak stories of the series will take place, most of them between LGBT people, but not only.
And it is that, unlike the play, there is no longer just a couple or a single story. The adaptation to series supposes another dimension, even greater than that of a film adaptation (which was even considered). “A series expands the universe in all directions and has multiple possibilities, he assures. What he wanted to tell with the series is “that there is not just one way to love. The beauty is that there are different ways of understanding love and heartbreak in Different moments”.
What is clear is that ‘Smiley’ does not deny what it is, on the contrary, it wears it very well. It is a romantic comedy and also set at Christmas to add emotion to the matter because as Clua says “that we are not ashamed to get excited and that we are not ashamed of the teardrop, that we are going to play that, that we are going for all and the public that going to see Smiley has to go all out because we are going to offer them this, good shit”. References to gender are evident with explicit mentions such as ‘My girl’s beast’, among other comedies by Howard Hawks or Norah Efron and are They are also in all those entanglements, encounters, disagreements and in the inevitable attraction between the protagonists. “The paths that the references that I have mentioned travel are parallel and feed off each other. We wanted to make an open tribute to the romantic comedy. We jumped into the pool with all the elements of the romantic comedy, adopted them as our own, transgressed them and turned them into something else.but above all we always have the priority of making people laugh and moving”.
Cuevas and Esparbé have also seen many of those romantic comedies, those that are mentioned and others that are not. “It was important to soak up the tone, even though we saw the work a few years ago, for the musicality of the dialogues, soaking up that type of movie was a very good support,” says Esparbé. Of course, there is not a movie with protagonists who are not heterosexual and that is why ‘Simley’ is more necessary “so that we don’t just talk about two titles”. The other would be ‘Heartstopper’, the series that was a boom and that many people described as the series they would have wanted to see as teenagers. Both are going to share a platform, Netflix, which in fact has just received an ODA award as a diversity speaker. The two protagonists acknowledge that they did not see the previous phenomenon because it caught them “in the middle of filming”, but they assure that they are delighted to add references because “it is a matter of normalization” not only for people in the group.
Smiley is for another age group, more adult, and reflects a generation that, disenchanted with the dating app trend, is looking for something else. Álex agrees on that, more positive, superficial and living in the moment; and Bruno, more intellectual and a hopeless romantic who believes in the connection of destiny. But no matter how much they want to fall in love, they will have to suffer. “The characters suffer because looking for love is not easy and they carry a backpack well loaded with some unpleasantness that they have taken away,” Cuevas tells us. “They really want what happens to them to happen to them, but they are the first to not realize that what they are experiencing is very beautiful,” she adds. For Esparbé the key is “the fear of surrendering to the experience because there is always the possibility of rejection”.