Ignacio Isusi, actor: “I’m a posh boy who has gone off the rails”

A couple of weeks ago, browsing X, one of his hilarious monologues popped up, where he played a posh, posh, Basque, Basque character, somewhere between tender and grumpy, fighting for the “integration of normal people.” I wrote to him ipso facto on Instagram to propose an interview. He replied instantly: he had just returned from Bilbao, where he was born and prospered, to Miami, where he lives with his wife and three daughters, advising the rich and famous on “managing success.” But he planned to return to the Basque Country to attend his father’s eightieth birthday, and he didn’t mind stopping by Madrid beforehand to see us. “It must be for the money,” he half-joked. No sooner said than done. So he shows up at the EL PAÍS newsroom 10 minutes before the agreed time, loaded with gifts: glasses like the ones he uses in his monologues and a T-shirt with the legend “I am an aspirational posh girl” for the interviewer, a direct hit, and a beautiful book: Humano. A volume of his poems illustrated with paintings by his friend José Bellido, which he self-published in 2013 with a very specific idea: to leave his daughters something beautiful as a legacy, even if he didn’t sell a single copy, not even to close friends. He has one green eye and one brown. Chameleon-like, he certainly seems.

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You arrived 10 minutes early. Is it less elegant to arrive early or late?

Late, always. What they say about 10 minutes of courtesy is 10 minutes of discourtesy with other people’s time. Normally, I arrive early and wait, but I was anxious. I’ve waited a long time for a moment like this in my life.

Your boom on social media is very recent, but how much ice is beneath the tip of that iceberg?

A whole lifetime. This is not a coincidence. It might not have happened, but it’s the consequence of a life of work in many contexts. I’m hyperactive: I’ve done a thousand things. I studied Law at Deusto because, although I hated it, it never occurred to me that I could study anything else. It was the natural path in my family and my environment. Until I had a very serious personal crisis, I left my company, went to the United States, and since then, I’ve been dedicated to the world of coaching, helping very rich and very famous people manage success. I was doing very well, but something was missing. In the middle of the pandemic, a friend, who knew I liked theater, invited me to participate as an actor in the play La que se va a armar. We premiered in Miami and it was a huge success. I had been looking for that feeling my whole life. Others find their place when they’re young. I found mine at 50. Everything has fallen into place at the right time, now, I almost didn’t make it, I tell you that too.

How does a man who doesn’t find his place live?

Well, with an intimate torment. I am happily married and have three wonderful daughters, but I have lived in intimate solitude, very much against the image I project. People who know me think I’m a fun and super friendly guy, but, intimately, until recently, I felt a deep sense of imperfection: that’s the word.

So, beneath your posh humor, there’s pain.

Life has given me blows like everyone else. But my mother’s illness and death blew my mind. She was a woman with an uncommon presence and genius. And suddenly, at 62, she was diagnosed with cancer and given four months to live. I had never felt such strong pain. I left everything and offered to collaborate with the Spanish Association Against Cancer, and that experience changed my life. I wrote scripts, invented stories to alleviate the suffering of patients. Then I would come home and cry, but my mother told me I was the joy of the hospital. You’re going to laugh, but I talk to my dead mother every day, I feel her: it’s like I have a drone above me, and when I do those monologues I do now, I ask her, who was a lady of all her life, if they are funny. Humor is innate. And laughing at oneself is very healthy.

So, you were the life of the party at home.

Totally: the joy of the house, of school, of my friends. And I still am: at weddings, they always put me at the most boring table to liven up the atmosphere. I’ve always been the funny one: the eldest of five siblings, always inventing things, always talking to myself. That, really, is what I do now, but with an audience, I finally have one.

Were you as well-behaved a child as Leo, your character?

Yes, in Bilbao they often say “we are middle class: people of all our lives.” My father is a notary, but he wasn’t always. He was an IBM salesman who started studying for competitive exams and passed them in a year and a half: a textbook prodigy. But, as he says: we don’t descend from anyone, we have ascended ourselves. But, at the same time, my parents are tremendously austere: I never had the perception that we were rich. At home, money was not discussed because it was vulgar. And as a child, I asked permission even to take a Coca-Cola from the fridge.

How did you conceive your character, Leo?

Well, that has also been a tortuous path. It all stems from my despair last year when, after the huge success of the play I mentioned, and a short film I put together, Ni lobos ni corderos (Neither Wolves Nor Lambs), which was another huge success, selected in 50 countries and where I play two characters at once, I thought: I’ve made it. But no. I called all the agencies in Spain and no one called me back. So, seeing that no one was going to come looking for me, and I am very tenacious, precisely because I am the son of who I am, I invented some characters: a civil servant, a guy from the neighborhood, an executive, like Cámera Café, until I had 60 or 70 monologues and, last November, I started uploading them to social media. But no one saw them. Among my friends there was total silence, as if they were embarrassed by what I was doing. My wife was fed up with me. Until one day…

…Surprise me.

Well, what was happening to me was what an Ecuadorian friend told me: that I was staying in the first two layers of the onion: in my family and my friends, and he told me: “You have to do something that reaches the third layer: general interest.” So, one day, skiing with my father in the United States, because we’re not rich, rich, but I have friends with mansions, planes, and boats, I picked up the phone and recorded myself in one go. Leo, Mafalda, all the characters came out. I uploaded it and it blew up, and it has been ever since. I think it was because of the authenticity. But beneath all that improvisation was all that path we talked about, and which I had to travel.

But, then, are you posh or not?

I’m a posh guy in freefall.

But you live in Key Biscayne and advise very rich people on managing success.

So what? People think posh is anyone who is socioeconomically above them. And, no. There are many degrees of posh, and very subtle ones. You can be well-to-do people all your life and not have a penny. So, I’m a posh guy in freefall because I’m a maverick, I’ve gone off track. As a friend in Miami says: in this life you have to be either a dog or a shepherd, but never a sheep. Belonging to a tribe conditions you a lot, and I’ve left the flock. And sometimes, no one wants you to leave, because then you point them out.

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Don’t you think your videos are funny because you know what and who you’re talking about?

Well, I probably miss a lot. Maybe they invite me to Buckingham Palace and I make a fool of myself. Everyone is posh to someone. My mother used to say it when she was in the hospital: there’s always someone worse off than you. It’s not a comfort, but it’s a reality. So, yes, I know codes and archetypes because I’ve seen them. But, when people talk about inequality in Spain, comparing it to the United States, it makes me laugh. In Spain there’s a super large middle class. Even in the most disadvantaged neighborhoods there’s a butcher shop and a fish market. In the United States, inequality is savage. I haven’t seen the degree of misery there in Spain. Nor the degree of rich, rich. Well, there’s Amancio Ortega, but in Miami, for example, there are many very rich people: with planes, boats, hundreds of houses, helicopters.

And how do you teach them to “manage success,” according to your coach business card?

For me, success isn’t having money, but having just enough to be happy. For example, I wasn’t happy because there was a huge void inside me from not having found my true nature, even though it was right in front of me. So, yes: I work with seemingly successful people with a lot of money, but who have failed as individuals. That’s why they hire me. And they pay me damn well. Because there’s a lot of sadness and a lot of fear of addressing it in therapy, and the difference with coaching is a very fine line. I’m talking about serious problems: alcoholism, drugs, lost children, marital failures, horrible loneliness.

But sorrows are less with money, aren’t they?

I don’t know what to tell you. Surely, yes. But that can be a trap. The rich buy, buy, buy. But the rich cry a lot. The well-to-do people we were talking about, with well-established values, are usually austere in everything.

What is classism?

For me, classism is a bastardly act, an abuse of one human by another. Classism is disgusting. That’s why I believe well-educated people are not classist. Well, maybe there is an innate condescension, but I think it’s something they’ve absorbed, they were born with it, they’re not guilty, there’s no implicit malice. But there’s also some truth to “don’t serve those who served”: I’ve also seen a lot of classism from those below towards those above in the form of class resentment.

As an actor, aren’t you afraid that you won’t be taken seriously because of your recent and brilliant success as a comedian?

It’s a fear I have, yes, very much. I don’t want to stick with the character, no matter how successful it is, because I am an actor. Since all this is happening to me late, with my life already made, I want to do things well, that’s why I’m an entrepreneur and I have a strategic vision. I have a mission: to win an Oscar.

Right, right.

People crack up when I say it, but it’s true. I know I’m going to win it, because I see it in my head. I’m like a child with a toy he knows how to use and has been waiting a long time to play with. Besides, it’s wrong for me to say it, but I’m from Bilbao, and I’m a crack.

Well, for now, Arturo Pérez-Reverte or Santiago Segura have praised your videos on social media. How did you feel when you saw that?

I confess it made me very excited. I’m a fan of intellectually sharp people of all stripes. I don’t care if they’re left-wing or right-wing, I leave those passions for football. It flattered me, honestly. Because, in my social context of a posh guy in freefall, of well-to-do people all my life, I think I’m seen as a rara avis. So, suddenly, the blessing of Pérez-Reverte, or Santiago Segura, or the philosopher Javier Gomá, is like it has removed that stigma. Now, I also tell them that I’ve been doing this for a long time, so, not before and now yes, you bastards?