Following on from our recent review of the ‘creature feature road trip’ movie The Passenger, we were pleased to get the opportunity for a quick chat with leading man Ramiro Blas, who plays the inimitable (and potentially divisive) leading man Blasco in the film. Blas has a long pedigree as an actor – over twenty years – and a wide range of experience in TV and film. But it’s in The Passenger that many of the readers of the site may be encountering his work for the first time. We talked about his experiences playing Blasco and of appearing in The Passenger (which hits some theatres on June 3rd and VOD at the end of this month).
WP: Firstly, thank you very much for talking to Warped Perspective! You are an experienced actor who also has some experience in genre cinema – including a role in [REC] 4. What attracted you to The Passenger?
RB: What attracted me to The Passenger, obviously when I finished reading the script, was the arc that occurs with this kind of retrograde, homophobic and even sexist antihero, but throughout the filming that changes radically and you realise that he is a character from the deep Spain with an old-fashioned education like the one that exists to this day in many villages. I was interested in how he ends up becoming almost a lovable and admirable character. The way he goes from antihero to hero.
WP: Where did you find the inspiration for Blasco? In your opinion, is he a sympathetic character? Does he have good attributes?
RB: I consider that he is a character full of kind attributes that make him a gentle being; he even goes so far as to risk it all for a creature that has nothing to do with him and ends up almost adopting her with a paternal kind of love, beyond anything the first indications of the film suggest.
WP: How do you expect audiences to react to Blasco?
RB: We talked a lot during the filming and during the creation of the character about how we originally expected people to be a little freaked out by the kind of retrograde character that he was. However, I always bet that he was a character who was going to stay with the audience and that he would end up being loved. In fact, I learned to love the character. It is a character that allowed me to change a lot the image that I have as an actor, because here in Spain (because of the series that I have done before) I was always stuck in the role of the bad guy. However, this character is tinged with a goodness and a sincerity that filled my soul.
WP: The Passenger gets quite…messy in places. Did you enjoy working on this kind of ‘body horror’ project? What was fun, and what was not so fun?
RB: The characteristics of the filming attracted me a lot, especially because I know the directors and I knew what they were looking for. I had already worked on short films with them, especially with Fernando [González Gómez], and I know his cinematographic point of view. The project caught me from the start, because as I read it I was imagining what the images were going to be like, especially because of that continuous tribute that the film pays the cinema of the 80s where horror became entertainment as well. There are many analogies to great directors and great films of the 70s and 80s.
The good things about the project were really everything: travelling through the character and their moments, discovering within myself what were the real fears that this character could feel. The only bad thing was the weather conditions, because it was filmed at night in the middle of the mountain forest and the cold was enormous! That’s the only bad thing I could say.
WP: In terms of your own likes and influences – are you a genre film fan? If so, what kinds of films do you love?
RB: Well, I don’t know if I could say that I’m a fan of the genre. But it’s a genre that amuses me above all things, and in which I always try to find a fear that goes beyond the pre-established, beyond the stereotyped. I do like horror movies with lots of reality. I like psychological horror films, especially where the fears of any human being are manifested in the film and where the actors who play the characters in the film transmit and transmute, going through those fears in an absolutely real way.
WP: And finally, now that The Passenger is getting a release – what is next for you?
RB: At the moment I am shooting a rather dark series, a psychological thriller for the Netflix platform and then there are a couple more film projects to shoot in Italy that we are waiting for. The actor’s life is like that, we are always waiting sweetly…
Many thanks to Ramiro Blas for his time!