The actor Denys Ramos with a leading role in the telenovela El rostro de los días

July 1, 2020

Not always do television viewers have the opportunity to enjoy the same day two completely different characters played by the same actor, and have both be good.

The Lester from the excellent series Zoo, rebroadcast by Cubavisión, and the Fabián from the current telenovela, The Face of Days, is Denis Ramos, a familiar face generally praised by critics and the public.

Fabián in The Face of Days is an attentive and caring father who takes care of a baby under one year old and who faces constant criticism from the grandmother of his late wife.

One cannot forget his performance in Of Love and Hope and neither in Fight Against Bandits, the Other War, in addition to other television proposals.

Playing when you are a child is playing, you have no one to judge you. You have no one to tell you if something is right or wrong, you are simply playing and what you are doing doesn't matter to anyone. I played with another friend, a neighbor who ended up becoming an actress too. Simply, it was the pleasure of feeling good doing it, and suddenly arriving at a theater, what is a theater as such, a small stage with seats with older people looking at you, at only 10 years old.

Other actors from Humberto Rodríguez's group at that time ended up working with Flora Lauten. It was truly moving to know that a person who already had many years of experience simply said yes, that I had talent. It was something very nice, the word is not exactly nice, the word really is impressive for my life. It was great when suddenly I was on stage, already premiering the work that was my debut.

of Humberto, but for me it was very very gratifying to know that I could do something like acting".

After spending almost three years, roughly from ages 10 to 13, without doing any theater, without knowing anything else, without learning anything, Adolfo Llauradó opened the theater for adolescents. It was a community workshop; from the moment I entered I had that sense of belonging, like my home. By the way, it was across from my house. Adolfo behaved with us as if he were our father. He was very strict, the workshop was taught by Llauradó and Eduardo Benítez.

Then came the National School of Art (ENA) "I didn't arrive at ENA with empty hands, but with some studies and some readings that a child of 13 or 14 years old shouldn't have had; which, even within the academy, one shouldn't have them at certain ages.

For me, ENA was a step in consolidating knowledge and understanding, and I was able to put into practice some things I hadn't fully achieved within the workshops.

Then came Stories of Fire, the Villalobos, Here We Are, in the theater The Postman of Neruda. The acting thesis from the Superior Institute of Art was La verbena de la paloma, a piece directed by Bertha Martínez. The Wizard of Oz, version by Abelardo Estorino directed by Fabricio Fernández, and Tango, by Mrozek; A Midsummer Night's Dream and Twelfth Night, both works by Shakespeare, directed by Carlos Díaz, and, of course, Doubt, which is my first one-man show.

He has done very little film, and now with Opus Habana and From the Heart of Havana, directed by Otto Braña, is that he is doing radio.

From the good Fabián or Pavel to the diabolical Lester. Evidently, they have not typecast you. Do the characters come to you or do you seek them out as a challenge to your potential?

"From Pavel to Lester is incredible because I have always believed that we have many ways of being and we are not always the same person in all moments, nor in all circumstances nor in all places. Simply Pavel has many things of Denys Ramos or Denys Ramos has many things of Pavel; Lester also has part of Denys and it's like lending a piece of all the colors that one can have to a character, and giving him other colors that one doesn't have. The change between one character and another is complicated, because the main thing is that one has to know oneself and know to what point one could in certain circumstances behave one way or another.

"As for challenges and potential, I am always wishing to have characters that are a challenge and trying to create and develop them the best I can, bringing them everything I can. That is what I always try to do; whatever the character is, I try to do it because the magnitude, the difficulty or not that others see in it doesn't matter. All characters have their difficulties, they depend on the personalities of each one. And I have been fortunate, I have thought about it a lot, to do characters that are different".

"One of the things that has left me with the greatest satisfaction is trying to make all the characters I do well, but it's not always that way. At least in characters like The Postman of Neruda, my own thesis La verbena de la paloma, where I played a dwarf who walked like a dwarf and made many people in the audience believe that there really was a dwarf there… When you achieve that kind of thing, when you are on a stage, alone, like in the one-man show Doubt, for more than 50 minutes, sometimes up to an hour, depending on the actions of the theater (it doesn't always last the same, it can vary by just a few minutes), when you feel that you are enjoying yourself, then everything is clear. That's why defining a character is difficult...

"Siddhartha is the name by which almost all people know me; Pavel, Cristóbal in Fight Against Bandits, are characters that have really left me satisfied".