Jacqueline Arenal faces a mysterious challenge: "They won't allow me to give details yet"

March 28, 2021

"Breaking the silence seen from a distance reconnects me today with all of you, and I'm very grateful for the comments and posts from everyone and the wonderful opportunity that Rolando Chiong and Legna Pérez offered me to step into the shoes of this character from the profound tragedy of his life story and his courage to face it and seek dignified solutions, a true privilege.

"Thank you also to everyone involved in giving voice and image to the fight against abuse from all angles and of course to the extraordinary cast that accompanied me and all the technical team that alongside these excellent directors continue to show that good television is possible," wrote Jacqueline Arenal about the number of comments that her moving participation in the recent episode Cadena of the acclaimed series sparked.

It was her return to the small screen, although in the afternoons she can also be seen on Cubavisión in Destino prohibido, playing Rosario, a gypsy woman who has nothing to do with the drama of the mature woman who is abused.

Months ago in a long interview with the unforgettable Verena Contreras, she spoke to me about her life and from that I extract the part referring to the small screen:

"When did you start in television, what was your first job and how did you get it?

My first television job was playing Cinderella for the space Once Upon a Time. I'm very grateful to life because from a young age it offered me valuable opportunities and La Botija was my second work. A gem, I don't know if that series is still preserved, hopefully it could be rebroadcast because it's wonderful, directed by Danilo Lejardi, cinematography by Ángel Alderete and a cast of great artists.

There I shared leading roles with Vladimir Cruz, the actor from Strawberry and Chocolate, at a time when we were both still studying. "It was a great story, with an extraordinary script. Back then there were some FAR Studios that did fabulous things, like this series of 18 episodes, shot with film cameras in the natural settings of the Sierra Maestra. We had to live on Pico Turquino and we traveled by burro. "How did I get there? Word spread at ISA that they were looking for very young people who looked even younger than they were, for a series they were going to make.

Several of us girls showed up for the audition and I was worried because the character was a peasant girl and I had grown up in Havana. But Danilo Lejardi is a director with special sensitivity to adapt to the young actor's universe and already in the first conversation, when he gave me the scenes, he was very clear about what he wanted and gave me precise information. "I came home, I started preparing myself, looking around for some clothes that could serve me, and when I showed up I was already an unknown person. He didn't know who my parents were, he chose me simply as another ISA student.

I keep the wonderful experience of the brave women of the Sierra, those girls I met there who taught me a way of life not without beauty, which I didn't know."

Have you gotten rid of the name Verena yet? What did that character give you, just popularity?

I still haven't shed the name Verena Contreras. That's what they call me at airports, hospitals, everywhere people remember me so much and baptized me with that character. At first you fight against it, you think about all the other things you've done, wondering if that means the others weren't as well-liked.

"But Verena connected with a large audience and gave me what we call popularity, which is important not only as food for your ego, but because it indicates that you reached people's hearts and that's something very difficult. There are excellent actresses and actors who have never achieved it, so over time I understood that this is a treasure, because people in Cuba don't just ask you for a photo but also help you a lot when you're a beloved character to them.

The Cuban public decided that I am Verena and I am. "Now, that's not all Verena gave me. I believe that Tierra Brava is a very well-written television work, inspired by Media Luna, a novel by Dora Alonso that is excellent. As an actor you can try whatever you want, draw on your experience, talent, tools, but if there's a bad script, you've lost 80 percent of the battle. Xiomara Blanco made a very interesting version, with very solid story and characters and she's an excellent television director. "It was my first soap opera, I went from doing things with few chapters to one with 120, in a leading role and having to work more than twelve hours a day, with twenty-five scenes a day, having to learn so much dialogue and with the ability to quickly solve the character's requirements.

No one imagines the work it takes and the immediacy with which you have to solve problems in a soap opera. "So I learned a lot, about soap opera language and acting as well, accompanied by a wonderful cast of actors I shared scenes with, you never stop learning and if you're lucky you eventually get to teach something to the younger ones. I consider this was a very important opportunity, and it's no wonder it's one of the most remembered soap operas, that people watch again and enjoy"

Tell me about your experience in Colombian soap operas.

In sixteen years of uninterrupted work in Colombia, I participated in many soap operas, series, and monothematic works, what they call teleplays here, that is, television movies. I entered playing a very popular character, Aunt Yoli in Los Reyes, and it was very complicated, because if it's sometimes complex to know popular culture even within your own roots, it's worse to arrive in another country and, even though they speak the same language and have common things, there are big differences and it requires research and observational power. However, that novel was a huge hit there, and I had the luck, once again!, to meet a wonderful director, Mario Rivero, a man of many audiovisual and acting technique knowledge, who had studied film in Russia, and also a great human being, who helped me enormously to internalize as quickly as possible the acting work I had to do.

"In Cuba I had done some popular characters; however, they didn't know me at all there and it was an incredible opportunity for an actress who was starting from zero, an important challenge that gave me an immediate connection with Colombian people. "After Los Reyes, which was a novel with a rating comparable to that of Tierra brava, at RCN they gave me an exclusive contract for five years and logically several similar popular characters came up, and sometimes I even decided not to accept, because I told them I didn't want to be pigeonholed and they were generous in that sense and proposed other kinds of things.

"Later I played more sophisticated women, representatives of the wealthy class. I did some popular characters with Caracol. In the series Mujeres asesinas I did something completely different: a schizophrenic woman who ends up killing her husband.

Then I worked in Pablo Escobar. El patrón del mal, in the role of a journalist who was kidnapped by the drug trafficker. For that I interviewed the real person and I consider it one of my most important works because I was playing a person of another nationality, ahead of other Colombian actresses, and it's a woman that people have reference to, they know what she looks like physically, her character, her accent, because in Colombia there are big differences in accent depending on the region.

"I've played very diverse characters; recently, I played a woman from a popular background, but who becomes rich and has a reality show in Miami, a strong but also funny, human and dictatorial character, a complicated character. I also played someone with multiple sclerosis, a very complex commitment as an actress, which involved great research work on the disease. So the range of characters I've played in Colombia is very broad"

With Rompiendo el silencio you return to Cuban television. Can you give us a little preview of this work?

I'm very happy that my return to Cuban television is with this series, which already had a first season when I wasn't here. In this second one, it's about gender abuse, abuse in general, workplace abuse, any kind of abuse.

A touchy subject for me, because I'm also a great defender of victims of any kind of abuse, from psychological to physical of any kind. I believe we play characters, but when our characters become spokespersons for our concerns, our struggles, that's also a great opportunity.

"In this case the director is Chino (Rolando) Chiong; he's done excellent work, the script is his too. I play a victim of abuse and, for the first time, I share leading role with Pichi (Jorge Perugorría). We've both wanted to work together for a long time and we're in a state of maturity in every sense, which allowed us to approach these so complicated characters. I don't want to give away much more, I want people to see the series. "His son, Andro Perugorría, plays the son of both of them in the series and really the big conflict is between the three of them.

It was brutal, living all the emotions of something terrible, where there's manipulation, abuse, psychological harassment, but with these two actors I had an impressive empathy and I'm satisfied to return to Cuba with strong work that also committed me as a human being" Jacqueline, who responds to every comment on Facebook, said in her thank you post:

"The other silence these days on social media is due to intense work and I'm giving you a little sneak peek (from the makeup room) in the middle of preparing for this new project that being a true challenge also produces infinite enjoyment for me.

They're not allowing me to give details yet but I think it will be within reach very soon. To give thanks, to give thanks, to give thanks... that's what it's all about" And I wrote to her in the chat "I hope for the scoop, a ring, a spot..." and this was the answer "yesssss it will be yours! So wait for the "mystery" that Verena, I mean, Jacqueline is working on.