“Café con aroma de mujer”, the telenovela in which Laura Londoño stars in the role of “Gaviota” has been sweeping Netflix for weeks, as the most watched non-English-speaking fiction in almost twenty countries. About this unexpected success on said platform, its female protagonist has spoken with total sincerity.
Premiere last year on the Colombian Canal RCN, the series -adaptation of the homonymous novel by 1994 by the master of the genre Fernando Gaitán- came to Netflix six weeks ago and has since become a phenomenon in Spain and Latin America.
In an interview via internet, Londoño (Medellín, Colombia, 1988), who plays the candid but brave coffee picker who falls in love with the owner of the farm (Cuban William Levy), talks with Efe about her role, his career and about the resurgence of a genre that is not usually conceited.
Question: How do you feel about the overwhelming success of “Café…”?
Answer: It was a gift and a surprise, something super nice. Last year it aired here in Colombia and on Telemundo in the US and did very well, but what happened was nothing special. It came out when we were still recording it and then you have too many emotions and too much anxiety that it will do well. However, months go by, it goes off the air and comes to Netflix and this happens at a time when I was not expecting it. It’s much nicer because there was no longer any expectation or need for anything.
Q: Where do you think this success in so many places comes from?
R: Almost thirty years after it was written, it has themes that are still themes today in our society, after so much time. I wish we had made a much more abrupt, more drastic change, but we continue to slip at some points as a society, regardless of whether you are called Colombia, Spain or Bolivia. “Café…” touches on important and critical topics such as machismo, the difference in social classes, racism, homophobia, bullying… They are topics that we have become accustomed to, but this is showing them to us and telling us that there is something which is not right.
Q: In the novel itself, arguments are made in favor of female empowerment, of class equality… Is it important to act as a mirror so that things change?
A: It is super important. “Café…” specifically is a very feminine story where women have a very important role and it is women who (…) are in charge of everything. This story when adapted to 2021 changes a lot and becomes another version because if something has changed in these thirty years it is the role of women in society. There has been talk but it is still important and timely to do so because, although we have come a long way and come a long way, we still have much more to go.
Q: You give birth in fiction and the next day you are spotless, thin, like nothing, does this help?
R: This is something that is very novel, it comes in addition with this genre. In the team we had this conversation. From my experience it is not the grams, because for example I am very skinny, I always have been. Here where you see me I am five days away from giving birth and I don’t look like it, I only have a belly. It is not a matter of gaining weight or not. But yes emotionally, it hit me very hard when I had my daughter. The next day she was skinny, but I felt destroyed, like a dirty rag. And this is obviously not allowed to a Seagull as the protagonist, nor to a Lucia as the antagonist. But it is a topic that is talked about and said. But there is tremendous machinery, an industry, that says “not so much”, that is very much a champion of “so far”, that scares them.
Q: Not only “Café…” reaps successes Are Latin soap operas experiencing a new renaissance?
R: We have been very good in the melodrama genre. At some point all this new movement of television arises, of the most American series, which is another way of narrating things. The telenovela is our daughter but we watched her for a long time as the ugly daughter. We said, let’s hide it and do what they’re doing there. We abandoned it a bit and I think that what is happening is that we are taking it up again, or that there is a symbiosis, a mixture. The novels will not end. There may be other genres, but how nice to rescue it and give it a new shine, like that little jar that was always in the house but we clean it and polish it, we put it back on the table and we see it beautiful again.
Q: Your career began in the world of soap operas, but you have done many other things, including the role of the daughter of Héctor Abad (Javier Cámara) in “El olvido que seremos” by Fernando Trueba…
R: Yes… It is a very strong story, very beautiful, very special and very important. And once again it is a story that happened in the 1980s and that we continue to sadly live today here in Colombia, as if time had not passed. Sometimes it’s hard for us. Time passes and we delay in taking certain steps and moving forward. But it was certainly one of the most special experiences.
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