Pablo Macaya

Feature image: Pablo Macaya is a Chilean award-winning actor. Photo by Netflix. Courtesy of Agencia La Luz.

Pablo Macaya is a Chilean award-winning actor whose playful art of acting explores reality and fiction. His versatile acting landed him on Netflix’s series “Baby Bandito” and “42 Días en la Oscuridad” (42 Days of Darkness), which reached the streaming platform’s top 10 ranking in the non-English category. He’s also appeared in Netflix’s feature film “Ardiente Paciencia” (Burning Patience). His acting is a reflection of the complexities that he experiences in life.

Pablo Macaya is a Chilean award-winning actor known for his emotionally engaging performances in feature films, television, and theater. In his last high school years, Macaya participated in a theater workshop. That was when he began discovering theater's power and strength. He started noticing how it is an artistic discipline performed in front of an audience.

That initial spark also answered his mundane question of finding a job that doesn’t feel like a job. A type of work that he doesn’t have to wake up early every day and that has no routine. The answers to these questions and his passion led him to study theater at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile. It’s been 30 years of theater and acting for Macaya, where he has honed his craft.

He understood his art of acting as a game of deceiving the audience to convince them of his characters. He centers on convincing people that what they’re watching is real. That the emotions, the story, and the characters are real.

That game requires exploring acting as an art whose base is human behavior. Macaya enjoys diving deep into human complexities when creating a character or performing on a stage.

Macaya finds himself as an actor and artist who struggles to feel like an actor in that playful art of acting. It’s taken him time to convince himself that he’s an actor, but it’s also led him to understand himself as an intuitive actor. He trusts his intuition by achieving a real connection with what he’s doing. That means he strives to connect with the character he’s interpreting and the story he’s part of.

That intuition comes with keeping himself open to a director’s instructions and collaborating with his acting colleagues. He describes himself as a living doll with real energy that seeks to do the best job in an ongoing collaboration with a director.

But being an actor implies Macaya lives in constant uncertainty, in which his abilities, capabilities, and capital quickly evaporate. It’s also a profession that conflicts with him whenever he’s not working.

Whenever Macaya feels his acting is the world’s best job, he builds and plays complex characters. Interpreting these characters means he’s expanding his knowledge as an actor because it implies putting himself in someone else’s shoes. It’s about imagining other lives and conflicts. He enters situations that are alien to him but make them his.

For him, it’s about expanding his mental and spiritual horizons by exploring his feelings and perspectives. It allows him to look at himself in the mirror. He questions himself and looks within to find those conceptual and abstract elements he needs to transfer to his work. It’s a professional performative art that becomes personal because he gets to know himself better and understands how the world around him functions.

This comprehension of the world is synonymous with the complexities of his characters.

He finds where his characters fail themselves within those contradictions. When they lie or when they’re sincere. He tries to understand why they do what they do. He scrutinizes characters step-by-step to comprehend how they transit through life. In this meticulous approach, he tries to make each character a particular one where reality strikes the audience. Macaya wants his characters to be honest and full of contradictions, lights, and shadows.

In that playful game of deception, Macaya found himself with tremendous acting opportunities from Netflix. To this point, he’s participated in one movie and two series. His most recent work was for the “Baby Bandito” series, where he played Pantera.

For “Baby Bandito,” he began the initial casting process by understanding Pantera’s character. Macaya described him as a man who carries a substantial load of violence—one that’s not precisely notorious for the audience at the beginning. He carries it in silence.

Macaya had to find Pantera’s complexities to portray that hidden violence and distrust. Before the series, he considered Pantera, a person who didn’t live. He survived. And in the most clandestine manner possible. He was invisible.

Pablo Macaya as Pantera for Netflix’s “Baby Bandito” series. Photos by Netflix. Courtesy of Agencia La Luz.

In that invisibility, Macaya questioned why Pantera joined an improvised criminal gang that clearly had no experience in committing crimes.

Pablo Macaya as Pantera with Nicolás Contreras as Kevin Tapia for Netflix’s “Baby Bandito” series. Photos by Netflix. Courtesy of Agencia La Luz.

Kevin Tapia is the main character of “Baby Bandito,” which was played by Chilean actor Nicolás Contreras. The series is inspired by Chile’s “biggest heist of the century,” which happened in 2014 at the Arturo Merino Benítez International Airport in Santiago. Tapia was inspired by Kevin Olguín, who was one of the gang’s members who carried out the heist. The show was directed by Chilean directors Julio Jorquera, Fernando Guzzoni, and Pepa San Martín, and Diego Muñoz was the series’ head scriptwriter.

That’s one of the few clear examples of how Macaya is part of projects that tend to speak from reality but add a touch of fiction to it. It’s a trend in his works, but he strives to get away from the reality aspect of it.

For Macaya, the script is his sacred book to follow, and the reflections that a series like “Baby Bandito” presents from the Chilean and Latin American realities are a result of the collaborative process that a Netflix series entails.

Social reflections on Latin American realities result from combining the music, emotions, rhythms, montage, direction, and many other elements composing a television series, feature film, or theater play.

For Macaya, it’s a puzzle where he’s placing two pieces together rather than focusing on the big picture, and that’s a methodology he uses throughout his work. He also used it when playing the character of Víctor Pizarro in Netflix’s series “42 Días en la Oscuridad” (42 Days of Darkness), which was Chile’s first series for the streaming platform.

This series is inspired by another real case: the Viviana Haeger case. In 2010, Viviana Haeger disappeared in Puerto Varas in the southern part of Chile. After 42 days, her body was found in her home.

Given this background of an inhumane tragedy, working on this particular project entailed a difficult challenge for Macaya. It meant working in the production of a series that avoided the re-victimization of the people involved in the real story, especially when it’s a sensitive subject that deals with violence against women. Macaya described that element of the series as one of great importance. He mentioned that throughout the series, there’s no image of the body, a reference to the body, no blood, or autopsy.

Besides that, Macaya mentioned that when filming, they were close to the real place where things happened. The family was close by, and it was known what the production team was doing.

With that in mind, Macaya took on the challenge of playing Víctor Pizarro during a time when he was coming back to acting. A time he felt he was very far away from his craft and thought he’d given up on it forever. That comeback in acting meant challenging himself but also dealing with harsh weather conditions when filming “42 Días en la Oscuridad.”

Nature plays a key role in the series. While filming, he was faced with constant rain, cold, and wind. Macaya explained that those extreme weather conditions helped him dive deep into his character.

To portray the ongoing struggle that Víctor Pizarro faces throughout the series, Macaya mentioned that the extreme weather conditions helped him. His coat was wet, and the car he drove did not work well. The difficulties helped him create a character fighting against everything and wanting to get his life back.

In those difficulties, Macaya also found Víctor Pizarro’s complexities.

Pablo Macaya as Víctor Pizarro for Netflix’s “42 Días en la Oscuridad” series. Photos by Netflix. Fabula Production House. Courtesy of Agencia La Luz.

Even if his character does not achieve a resolution, he seeks to convince the audience by exploring reality and fiction. In that exploration, he’s always working towards creating a character and scenario that feels natural, not forced. That is portrayed in how he plays with his sincerity, moves, behaves, and manipulates objects.

That openness also implies being able to perform any character he’s presented with, whether it’s a main character or a secondary one. It also means being able to perform in a feature film, series, or theater play that creates a feeling of nostalgia and hope or one that reflects on social issues.

Macaya is a versatile actor that can go from serious and painful works to happy and joyous ones, as is the case in his participation in Netflix's film “Ardiente Paciencia” (Burning Patience), which was the streaming platform’s first Chilean feature film. The piece is an adaptation of Antonio Skármeta’s novel “Ardiente Paciencia.” It’s the love story about a young woman (Beatriz) and a young man (Mario) who fall in love through poetry verses.

Macaya plays the character of Jorge, who is Mario’s father. Once he was told about the film, Macaya was immediately interested in participating in the project because of what “Ardiente Paciencia” means to him.

It didn’t matter what character he was going to play. He wanted to be part of it because of his personal connection with “Ardiente Paciencia.” Even though this feature film doesn’t really draw from reality as “Baby Bandito” and “42 Días en la Oscuridad” did, it does focus on showcasing Pablo Neruda. Neruda was an internationally renowned Chilean poet, diplomat, and politician who won the 1971 Nobel Prize in Literature.

That specific detail was significant for Macaya when working on the project because it meant visiting places where Neruda once transited.

Being immersed in the same place that Neruda moved was a source of joy and help for Macaya’s acting, but the film also entailed a different challenge. Since it’s about poetry, Macaya needed to portray a dreamlike vibe and magical spirit. He described it as a very poetic film with its images in which a young couple falls in love through verses, something he thought of as difficult while he laughed explaining.

It also meant exploring a different side of Chile.

With that historical background, Macaya explained that the director’s call was to create a film about love. One where everyone involved in the movie knows how the tragic Chilean period in history ended, but he wanted to create a special film.

It was an exercise of nostalgia, and playing was one of Macaya's main sources of joy. He was part of a project that delved into creating a reality that doesn’t exist or a nostalgia that idealizes old times.

It's part of a story that creates a dreamlike environment where Macaya contributes with his playful acting. He’s part of a collaborative project that’s creating a spirit, a sensation, and a memory of that specific era. A feeling but not a reality.

That feeling comes through Macaya’s playful art of acting that explores reality and fiction. It’s a performative art that he enjoys as a game of deception to convince the audience to believe that what they’re watching is real. It’s an artistic discipline watched by millions of people worldwide through Netflix, generating a sense of satisfaction, gratitude, and freedom for him. It’s also a reflection of the complexities that Macaya has experienced in his life.

Visit Agencia La Luz's website to keep up with Pablo Macaya’s playful acting, which explores reality and fiction.

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