The Creative Side of Acting: The Case of Mirella Pascual in Whisky

Abstract

Whisky was both Mirella Pascual’s first featurelength film and the film that sealed her reputation as an actress, as she was praised by international film critics for her leading role. This essay explores the creative and artistic side of Pascual’s acting in the aforementioned film without falling into the “rhetoric of realism”, which judges actors’ performances on the basis of “honesty” and “truth”. Instead, the ways in which a person positions him or herself as an actor (Mauro, 2016) and the intimate and contextual level of acting (Meldolesi, 2006) are studied, allowing an examination of what Maltby (1995) calls “the double-consciousness paradox”, that is, the co-presence of two identities in one single body. In this way, the notion of the actor as a mere interpreter is superseded, shedding light on how the striking nature of Pascual’s acting stems from her creativity in the process of her becoming a creator and an artist.