Candela Peña explains how she prepared to play Rosario Porto in ‘El Caso Asunta’

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Candela Peña at the presentation of ‘El caso Asunta’ in Madrid (Juan Naharro Gimenez/Getty Images for Netflix)

The Asunta case landed on Netflix last Friday with the premise of delving into the crime of Asunta Basterra, the 13-year-old girl adopted by the couple made up of the lawyer Rosario Porto and the journalist Alfonso Basterra, who died on September 21, 2013 on a road outside Santiago de Compostela. The six-episode fiction is produced by Ramón Campos, a true crime specialist from his Bambú production company. The project that has just landed on Netflix is ​​not his first audiovisual experience in everything related to the case, since Campos, together with Elías León Siminiani, made a documentary series about the case, The Asunta case (Operación Nenúfar), the main germ of this new version in the key of fiction that has the characteristic rigor that always accompanies them.

Candela Peña (Gavá, 1973) does not need pomposity to sell the series she stars in (although she has already launched the occasional television pearl that has generated more interest, if possible, for its content). On this occasion, the role is more than amortized by Rosario Porto’s public notoriety. The Catalan interpreter has put herself in the shoes of the mother sentenced to 18 years in prison for murdering her daughter, a woman with severe mental problems who ended up committing suicide behind bars in 2018.

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When Peña went to the tests to be part of The Asunta Case, his role was not at any time associated with one of the protagonists of the story. Her tenacity and talkative nature allowed Campos to let her do the casting for Rosario Porto. She put on a wig and didn’t take it off until the end of filming. “I asked it,” she admitted in an interview with Infobae Spain about the possibility of playing Asunta’s mother. “They didn’t see me,” she said. But it was his. “I get caught with the changed license plate, I don’t have much to do with the external image that I give, I am much more fragile than I seem,” she explained about her initial reluctance to consider her as an ideal candidate for the role. her.

The interpreter, branded as problematic for her effusive statements to the press, felt attracted to the psyche of Rosario, a woman accused of killing a daughter she adopted when she was only a year old with her husband. “I am very interested in mental health and that lady’s head interested me,” she told this medium. Despite it being one of the most notorious black breaking latest news cases of the last decade in Spain, Peña believes that what she and Tristán Ulloa (who plays Alfonso Basterra) have created in The Asunta Case is “unrelated” to what the series narrates.

Official trailer for ‘The Asunta Case’.

“We have built a marriage that was loved extremely,” but that ended up collapsing. Peña believes that public opinion had a lot of opinion in everything related to marriage. “They entered the room already being judged,” believes the actress. “They were convicted based on evidence, based on indications, but never based on anything proven,” she adds. Deep down, “there was no one there but the two of them, so no one will ever know what happened.” Sharing scenes with Ulloa has been an exercise in “total plasticine”: “People may think that we are egg and chestnut, but we are the new Thelma and Louise of Spanish cinema,” says Peña about the acting duo. “Let them give us Colorado cannons that we shoot at each other,” she adds.

For the interpreter, Rosario and Alfonso were “a modern couple,” since he was the one who took care of the girl. “They had their roles changed,” she adds. Although she did not consider being able to metamorphose into the matriarch until the day of the tests, Peña believes she has blended in perfectly with her character. “The other day Netflix released a preview of the series, a tiny piece,” she begins. “I saw those images and for a moment I thought the excerpt was real,” she says. “There are people who do not have the case very present in Spain and I fantasize that they remember Rosario Porto with my face,” she says, laughing.

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Candela Peña as Rosario Porto and Tristán Ulloa as Alfonso Basterra in ‘El caso Asunta’ (Netflix)

On November 18, 2020, Rosario Porto was found hanged in her cell in the Brieva prison (Ávila), where she was serving her sentence for the murder of Asunta. Both she and Alfonso Basterra were sentenced to 18 years in prison for the crime of murder with the aggravating circumstance of kinship. It was not the first time that Ella Porto tried to take her life in prison: she had already tried in November 2018 with a cord that she tied around her neck while she was in the shower.

“I think that, in Rosario’s head, she was not fully aware of the guilt she had,” Campos tells Infobae España. “She was a person with mental problems and I think that, in some way, she had created a kind of barrier about what happened and how she lived it,” adds the producer and creator of Operación Nenúfar and El Caso Asunta. “It’s good that in Candela’s head the character of Rosario is innocent,” adds the creator, who saw how the actress volunteered for a role for which, initially, she had not been called.

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Netflix premieres the miniseries ‘The Asunta Case’.