Actor, poet, comedian, gym owner, Spanish heavyweight and kickboxing champion boxer… Hovik Keuchkerian (Beirut, 1972), from an Armenian father and a Navarrese mother, he developed many professional aspects throughout his life, but has been accumulating since he first appeared on the scene thanks to the magician Jorge Blass (the magician imitated Eugenio while hypnotizing him). Especially thanks to the two series, his television resume, which was acclaimed as ‘breathtaking’.Money Robbery‘Y’riot gear‘. The villain of ‘Assassin’s Creed’ is now shooting the Amazon Prime series based on Juan Gómez-Jurado’s successful trilogy ‘Red Queen’, and the second season of ‘The Head’ premiered on HBO Max. disturbing Mediapro editing with an international cast. His character, Charlie, has a lot of weight, both in acting and speaking most realistically: He hit 150, forcing him to gain 47 pounds. It’s now down to 130, but with 1.91 height it continues to impose height , which, by the way, is very good for a character that spends half of the image in the company of a mouse.
How was your shoot with Blanda, the rat who accompanied you for most of ‘The Head’?
Wonderful. From the very beginning you will shoot with a rat and I dreamed… Well, a rat. When I got there, he was with his pet, Blanda, but he’s a super clean, super cute lab mouse that looks like a hamster. You had to see how he reacted, because a very important part of working with Charlie as an anchor was that his real friend was a mouse. The script read: “Charlie puts the mouse on his shoulder.” And we had to see if the mouse remained. But yes it was good.
Charlie evokes a lot of sensitivity in the audience with his boyish character, his imposing appearance and fear as you never know where it will come from.
He is a child in the body of an adult. Basically, he is a child in the body of an animal. He is always in his brother’s shadow. [interpretado por el otro español de la segunda temporada de ‘The head’, Enrique Arce], is guarded by her, and sees her dream come true when, due to circumstances, her brother has no choice but to embark her with the rest of the crew. And it turns out that this is not a typical cruise, but a very special ship. But Charlie doesn’t realize this until very late in the act. If he realizes at some point… He is happy because he has something he never had, a large family.
Was the character crafted in a special way? Charlie has a childlike personality as he doesn’t act like the rest of the team.
I prepared it with the same seriousness as in all my works, because the preview, the pre-production, is the part that impressed me the most. Since it was not fully defined, we sat down and decided in no time that we were going to make a 9-year-old boy, because it was already dissonant to get a child into that physique. If we added some kind of problem while speaking, some stuttering, we would charge it. So I forgot about Charlie’s appearance and played the kid. That’s when George [Dorado, el director y productor ejecutivo] “We already have Charlie,” he said.
‘The Head’ is a claustrophobic drama. Was it the same with the footage?
The weight on me was the weight that crushed my knees. Anything that moves, stairs, when I needed to, but I was carrying an excessive amount of weight. The issue of claustrophobia perhaps came second in my case, because my body was so big that what I wanted was to focus on it, focus on not hurting myself more than I did. So I don’t remember feeling claustrophobic either. Although it was shocking to record on board from the noise, the smell and imagining the work these people did for days on the high seas.
Did your 10 years of boxing serve to shape this character?
What I always say is I wouldn’t be the same person if I didn’t box for 10 years. If I wanted to take away my past as a boxer, I couldn’t do it, I couldn’t build a character without a boxer because I don’t know what it is. If I hadn’t boxed, I would have been a different player. An actor seeks the truth while acting, and for me boxing is essentially real. The bell rings and it’s true, so of course that goes for Charlie too. But even though I started this acting profession that I loved and fascinated the most, what boxing taught me was mainly to train the art of repetition. If you can’t throw straight to the left well, throw a thousand times. Well, here it’s about doing the same thing with a character.