KIMBERLEY TELL - "I MISS THE SEA"
About our interviews: we don’t ask questions, we listen to stories.
Interview and photographs: Andrei Runcanu @andreiruncanu
Kimberley Tell studied Fine Arts at Universidad de Barcelona and after finishing her degree she decided to start acting. She worked in Spanish TV series like Velvet, Algo que celebrar, Buscando el Norte. This year she worked on two new series, 45 Revoluciones, which will be aired on Netflix starting August 16th, and Hierro which is airing right now on Movistar Plus and in September on Arte in France and Germany.
Kimberley Tell links: Instagram / Actress profile
It’s a warm summer day and we’re getting ready for the interview. I’m in Europe and Kimberley is near Africa, in the island of Lanzarote. She was born there from a British mother and a Danish father. They all moved to Gran Canaria when she was four, then she went to University in Barcelona at 18 and at 25 she moved to Madrid. It was a 25-year trip from one of Spain’s farthest points to its capital. When we took the pictures for the interview it was a cold winter in Madrid. Trying to capture her in her safest and most common place, we took the pictures in her little flat in Malasaña neighbourhood.
But it’s summer again, her parents moved back to Lanzarote and now she’s visiting them on the island where she was born. She’s drinking hot tea, I’m sipping my last drops of coffee and we’re on skype, talking about the places she’s lived in. The wall behind her has a few framed prints from linoleum and copperplate engravings that were made by her. One of them features a house from Barcelona, where she studied Arts and where she shifted to acting by chance. “They were looking… someone had to be Grace Kelly… I mean they were looking for someone who looked like Grace Kelly and spoke English. It was a narrow casting. So they started looking everywhere, not only with acting agencies, but model agencies. So I got this call from an acting agency saying <<Look, Kim, we have this casting, would you like to do it>>? I said <<Why not>> and I did this online self tape and I got the job. It was one episode for a TV series. And then I got another casting where they were looking for an English girl, too. So then I got that series. And I suppose that was my niche. I was English. Which I’m not, I mean I’m Spanish. But I’m half English so I started working as a foreigner.”
Her face and eyes glow as she’s telling me about this series that she shot last year in the Canary Islands where she got to play a character from the Canary Islands: in her own language and hew own accent. It’s the first time, she says, when you get to hear the accent of the Canary Islands on Spanish TV. “It was like a camp. It’s a tiny island ( El Hierro), there’s nothing, they don’t even have a shopping centre or an ice cream shop, I mean nothing, there’s nature and tiny shops. There’s no discotheque, it’s just this bar where people go out and dance. So imagine, the crew from the series was almost the same number as the whole island’s population. They have the smallest hotel in the world, that’s what the island is famous for. So there was nothing to do. So we went to this woman who had a pizzeria and we lent her field and the electricians from the film crew built an open cinema and we watched The Rocky Horror Picture Show and Almodovar, so we were all watching and singing along and with all the stars it was incredible”.
We’re not leaving the islands as new stories, from her teenage years in Gran Canaria, emerge. “School would always stop when it rained. Our school was in the middle of a canyon so when it rains it creates like a river. So every time it rained, the school would get flooded and we’d have like a week off school. And once we were stuck in school and it started raining a lot and they had to bring helicopters and everything to get people out. So it was amazing, whenever it rained we were <<Yeah! We’re off school>>”. Her friends were always, bad kids, she says, “you know, they were smoking pot, they didn’t finish high school, but I was always really good in class. I was having good grades but I wasn’t considered a nerd. It’s also because I think it’s easier for girls to be good students and still be cool. You know, if you’re a guy you can only be cool if you’re a bad student. My boyfriends were like really bad. I remember I had this boyfriend, you know, with his motorbike, whatever. I split up with him so then I went out with another one, and then the first one would come and fight with that one, he broke his tooth, he had to go to emergency and I remember this huge drama, my ex boyfriend had no tooth. And then when I had another boyfriend, that one burned his motorbike.”
“My childhood is summer, it’s constant summer” she says, lifts up her laptop and takes me on a tour of her parents’ cactus garden. I’m looking at this beautiful piece of dry land that seems to absorb all the sun and then at their cute garden that probably smells like vacation. And then I remember that cold winter day in Madrid when we were taking the pictures. And I remember how, at some point, miraculously the sun came out. And we were so happy that we climbed out her little window that opens directly on the roof, and five or six storeys up from the streets below, we were closer to the summer. I did not know then how those winter pictures would be evoking the summer.
