For an actor who has built his career playing leading men in telenovelas and series across Argentina, Mexico, Spain and now Italy, Rodrigo Guirao thought he had already faced every challenge imaginable. Then came La Encrucijada.
The Argentine heartthrob stars as César Bravo in the Spanish drama, a mysterious man who returns to his hometown under a false identity to avenge his father's murder. But Guirao says the hardest part of the role wasn't the action scenes, the emotional twists, or even filming 60 episodes in less than six months. It was convincing audiences he was Mexican while shooting entirely in Spain.
"It was very difficult. Honestly, it was a tremendous amount of work," Guirao told this reporter during an intimate interview about his work in the series, which dropped this weekend on VIX. Unlike the telenovelas he previously filmed in Mexico, La Encrucijada presented an unusual obstacle. Every script was written in Castilian Spanish, even though his character speaks with a neutral Mexican accent.
"When I work in Mexico, the scripts already come written in Mexican Spanish, so that's one less thing to worry about," he explained. "This time I had to adapt all the dialogue from all 60 episodes."
The preparation became almost a second full-time job.
Guirao worked with a dialect coach before production began and continued meeting virtually during weekends while filming. On top of learning his lines, he spent up to an hour rewriting each day's scenes, changing vocabulary and expressions so they would sound natural coming from a Mexican character rather than someone from Spain.
"Sometimes adapting the dialogue alone took me 40 minutes or an hour before I could even start studying the scene," he said.
Making things even harder, most of his scenes were opposite Spanish actors speaking with their native accents."It was a lot of work because the majority of my scenes were with Spanish actors," he said. "Eventually I became so tired that I continued the process by myself because by then I already understood who the character was."
Instead of trying to imitate a specific region of Mexico, Guirao decided to create what he describes as a neutral accent that would feel authentic throughout the Spanish-speaking world.
"My character had lived in Spain, then Mexico and later in the United States," he said. "For me, he had something international about him that allowed the accent to be fairly neutral."
The result is one of the performances Guirao Díaz is most proud of.
Beyond the language challenge, he believes La Encrucijada stands apart from traditional telenovelas thanks to its cinematic production values.
Produced by Spain's Secuoya Studios, the series follows César as he returns to settle old scores, only to find himself falling for a woman connected to the very family he blames for his father's death.
"He changes his identity and comes back to the town where he was born to get revenge," Guirao Díaz explained. "At first he thinks he can use this woman to get information, but then he starts falling in love with her. That's where the biggest conflict begins."
The opening sequence immediately drew him into the project.
"I loved how those first 15 minutes turned out," he said. "The action and the cinematography are incredible. I think it's a perfect way to hook viewers from the very beginning."
One of those scenes takes place beside a towering cliff, a sequence so convincing that watching it on the big screen made even Guirao Díaz uncomfortable.
"I don't really have a fear of heights, but seeing that scene in the theater gave me a feeling of vertigo because it was so well done," he admitted.
Away from the cameras, La Encrucijada also left a lasting mark on his personal life.
When asked about reports that he found love during the production, Guirao Díaz smiled before confirming them. "You could say that," he said. "What more could you ask from a project?"
Now, the actor is preparing for another international chapter after recently completing a new series in Italy, where he performed much of his role in Italian while working alongside an all-Italian cast.
That experience, he says, would have been impossible without everything he learned while becoming Mexican for La Encrucijada.
"I could start a scene in Italian, switch to Argentine Spanish for a particularly difficult emotional moment, then finish in Italian," he said. "Working in different countries has given me the experience to make those switches naturally."
For Guirao, every new role comes with a different language, a different culture and a different challenge. But after spending months rewriting scripts just to sound like someone from another country, he has proven that sometimes the hardest performance is the one audiences never even notice.
