‘Society of the Snow’ star Enzo Vogrincic: ‘Imagine if we get to the Oscars and I send my friends a picture with DiCaprio. That would be crazy!’
The young Uruguayan actor is getting a taste of success for his performance in J.A. Bayona’s new film and says, as far as acting is concerned: ‘There was never a plan B’
Filmmaker J. A. Bayona wanted unknown faces to star in his film Society of the Snow. That’s how he imagined the crew and passengers of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571, the one that crashed in the Andes on October 13, 1972, leaving 16 survivors to struggle with snow, hunger and injuries. Society of the Snow charts the miracle and tragedy of those who spent 72 days lost and isolated before being rescued. To achieve this, Bayona wanted realism and, therefore, a group of actors willing to brave tough conditions, a process that started with casting.
Montevideo-born Enzo Vogrincic, 30, is one of the most prominent faces in the movie that will be released in select theaters in the United States on December 22 and on Netflix on January 4. He was discovered by casting director María Laura Berch, in a small theater in Buenos Aires: she went to him with a monologue and asked him to film himself performing it. He did almost 30 takes. Now, sitting in the Maria Cristina Hotel in San Sebastián during the Spanish premiere of the film that is about to change his life, he says he is more insecure than perfectionist, that he prefers to “do 180 takes” of something to combat his “inner wandering nature.”
He explains: “I can’t relax, so I’m focused. I suffer, but it works for me.” He sent the recording without knowing what it was for, and two weeks later he was notified that he had got through to the next phase. The following week, the entire cast met in Argentina. They already knew what it was about. They were to become members of the Old Christians rugby team who, together with their family and friends, filled almost all the seats on that fateful flight. Before signing and traveling to Spain for rehearsals in Barcelona and filming in Sierra Nevada, they had to accept that they would face difficult conditions, including weight gain and weight loss, and going cold and hungry. “There were nutritionists to help, but, as I was vegan, they couldn’t help me because it’s impossible to gain weight being vegan,” Vogrincic says. “I started at 64 kilos (141 pounds). I was always skinny, and I had to go up to 70 kilos (154 pounds). Going up is worse than going down because you have to force yourself to eat. But, in the end, I found a link to my character Nuna, which is sacrifice,” he says.
It was a tough shoot. Vogrincic, in particular, decided to stay on the mountain where the accident was re-enacted. “For the first time ever, I could dedicate 100% to a single project. It’s something me and my theater friends have always dreamed of, because when you do small theater, you take on several projects at the same time. You need to in order to keep doing what you want to do.”
According to Vogrincic, he was 15 when he knew he wanted to be an actor. “It was clear to me this was it, that there was no other option. I applied to the theater school in Uruguay and got in. And my parents asked me what plan B was, but there wasn’t one,” he says. He recalls that, when he was younger, he dreamed of being a spy. “But I didn’t tell anyone, because, of course, good spies never tell. I made up my own stories, so there was already a tendency to get into other worlds.”
But it was theater that he saw himself in rather than cinema. “In Uruguay, it is difficult to imagine yourself as a film actor,” he says. “There are Uruguayan films, of course, but it is a very small industry. It is not a realistic option. Then a short film crops up and you do it, then another one and a whole world opens up for you and you go on doing it, but this profession is very uncertain. You do a project and then nothing happens for months. You’re adrift, unemployed. I’m unemployed now, for example,” he says.
He is not idle, however. The promotional tour of Society of the Snow has taken him to the Venice Film Festival, and the San Sebastián Film Festival, and will see him touring the U.S. as it has already been nominated for best non-English language film at the Golden Globes. Vogrincic believes the success of the film will help his parents finally understand what he does for a living. “From a very young age, I realized that if you have things you like and you dedicate time to those things, they’ll happen,” he says. “Now, if you dedicate time to things you don’t like, they’ll also happen and start to take up the little time you have. I’ve managed to avoid things I don’t want to do. I’m living a life that is very short, but I’ve already seen my parents dedicate their lives to jobs they didn’t want.”
But as he pursues his dreams, Vogrincic has encountered several aspects of his new life he isn’t as comfortable with. “What I’m discovering is there’s a more aesthetic side to all this, a bit of a circus, that I don’t associate with what I do,” he says with a laugh. “All these interviews are like an extra role that I play, but this is not what I wanted. You start to have jobs like this, and they increase, and then you start to have other associated responsibilities that weren’t anticipated. It’s still hard for me. It’s not a place that feels like mine. My place is acting,” he says with unusual candor.
He talks of sacrifice and insists that, as far as acting is concerned, he has always been determined regarding the decision. His insecurity leads to obsessive perfectionism, but Vogrincic says everything that has happened to him is down to luck. Like the fact that his first leading role in an independent film, Nine, was a footballer who didn’t want to be one. “It was actually something that had happened to me,” he says. “My dad was a footballer and he put me on the pitch from the age of four until the age of 12, then watching the film he understood me. It was cathartic. I learn from the luck. I believe those of us who dedicate ourselves to this, end up concluding that it is all down to luck because there is no other explanation. But I always felt luck to be very much a part of my life.” He feels this more than ever as he prepares for all that is about to happen to him. “Imagine if we get to the Oscars and I send my friends a picture with DiCaprio. That would be crazy!”
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