October 2017. Cáceres, Pintores street. Claudio Portalo recited poems by Miguel Hernández; on the ground, his red hat, already with coins, and a sign that read ‘Theater student without resources, books are also accepted’. So it had been three weeks since Pintores had become his particular open-air theater, right from the day he saw himself in the red and a smile launched him into the street. It had been two years since he had come from his native Badajoz to Cáceres to fulfill his dream of being an actor and enter the Superior School of Dramatic Art.
The following years have gone by like a roller coaster until he has established himself as a reference face in television series that have placed him in prime time on the small screen. Today Portalo reappears in this newspaper, very different and very similar to that child he was, although now with the maturity and wisdom that putting himself in front of the cameras has given him.
He was still here; It was 2019 when Claudio (Badajoz, 1997) had just published ‘Yi la la’, his first collection of poems, a defense of naked bodies against the toxicity of the news. He understood this work as «the mirror or reflection of the society of superficial consumption of information in which we live. And what leads us, in one way or another, to misinformation. Right now I understand contemporary society being overwhelmed by information, through different means. What I capture in the book is how that information interferes with us. From there, interferential poetics has developed, which is nothing more than an adaptation of the new hypermodernist era to poetry ».
At the Pastor’s house
The phrase, verbatim, was the prelude to a poetic tour that took him through 15 presentations that led to Madrid. It was there that the encounter with the capital was born. And without thinking about it, or perhaps as a result of a quick deep reflection, he moved to the house of Luis and Pedro Pastor. Art in movement, music that makes art, sounds that are culture and that are also Extremadura.
It didn’t take long for the acting team of A6 Cinema. Hence directly the fourth season of The Ministry of Time, in a cast along with other actors such as Rodolfo Sancho, Aura Garrido, Nacho Fresneda, Hugo Silva and Macarena Garcia. He appeared in chapters 2 and 4 embodying a very young Antonio Banderaswhen the man from Malaga met the director in Madrid Pedro Almodovar and it rolled ‘Labyrinth of passions’. It was a work in which Portalo establishes similarities between fiction and his personal experience: Banderas & Portalo, two newcomers trying their luck in the mecca of Spain.
Suddenly 2020 arrives, a cursed year wherever they are with the outbreak of the health crisis derived from the coronavirus pandemic. «I return to Badajoz and I plunge into a deep depression that makes me fall to the lowest point», confesses the artist. It was a consequence of the virus that dragged down and diminished the mental health of thousands of people around the world. Forces were not lacking and he still almost with the quarantine in between he returned to Madrid. Since then he lives one of the best stages of his life.
He played Antonio Banderas in his stage as a new actor landed in Madrid and a friend of Almodóvar
That summer was non-stop. He edited ‘Karité’, his second collection of poems, where he explores three paths that will face and evolve through its pages. Giving concrete form to the concepts of the child and the man, life and death and the sensitive and the hooligan. A book that invites you to explore the bowels of the contemporary individual through the eyes of the artist. The presentation made him travel through Malaga, Seville, A Coruña, Badajoz, and of course, Cáceres.
Poetry, fashion and advertising complemented his working days until in 2022 he came across the third season of ‘The hunt. Guadiana’, which has just finished its broadcast with unprecedented success on RTVE. In the role of Nico, Portalo is part of an acting team led by Megan Montaner, Alain Hernández and Félix Gómez, playing the roles of Sergeants Sara Campos, Víctor Gamero and Lieutenant Ernesto Selva, to investigate a massacre in the town of Frontera de Guadiana, in Huelva.
It is a police thriller that will foreseeably land in NetflixAnd in the middle of all that, a stop at ‘Serve and Protect’, which also in La Primera, deals with the daily life of a police station in a neighborhood in the south of Madrid in which the most humane side of the people who work there is shown.
The actor already has in his hands ‘Hyperpoem’ (CB Foundation), his third collection of poems where he continues to explore life and being, believing that the revolution is the need to roll over oneself again to be aware of the importance of a present that Claudio Portalo is now living fully.
2023-04-24 05:09:27
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