It’s been over twenty years since Ana María Orozco became a household name for her role of Beatriz “Betty” Pinzón Solano in the telenovela Yo Soy Betty, la Fea. Now, with the character returning for Betty la Fea, La Historia Continúa on Prime Video, Remezcla had a chance to sit down with Orozco to discuss stepping back into Betty’s shoes, what made this story worth telling all these years later and what is left after a “happily ever after.”
The first thing for Orozco was finding Betty again, and that part came very naturally. Betty “is a character that I know a lot and some years ago we did a play, and we had a reunion, so I spent some time with the character again. So, in truth, it’s very comfortable for me to step into Betty’s shoes, I love her, it makes me happy to be Betty, and luckily it wasn’t hard, it really wasn’t.”
But this isn’t the same Betty from two decades ago, which Orozco recognizes and appreciates. “That’s really what’s interesting about approaching this stage of Betty twenty years later, because even at the time the story went against what the traditional telenovela was like, and touched upon many topics that weren’t broached on TV back then. So, part of the interesting thing about doing it again now was saying, well, how are we going to approach it? From what place?”
The place the show is choosing to approach it from is anything but the happily ever after we usually see. And that, for Orozco, was very rich storytelling material. “We are very afraid of conflict, we need to dream that everything is fine, but at the same time it is also nice to get in there, and I think the show always does too, as it did in the past, gets into places people don’t expect or aren’t so comfortable.”
We’ll see a lot of that in Betty’s relationship with her estranged husband Armando, and her daughter Camila. About that relationship, Orozco teased that. “It is a challenge to have children. When they reach adolescence not everything is as one dreams or as one expects. Motherhood and fatherhood can sometimes surprise you. Betty has a lot of learning to do with her daughter, and it is a very beautiful relationship, complex, but beautiful.”
Orozco also shared that, when it comes to Betty, la fea, there’s something symbolic about the title character’s return to her roots, because in reality “what she wants is to return to herself, to her essence, to ask herself who she is, what she wants, where she stands today.”
“And it is true that even as an actress since I played the character 25 years ago, I have never, truly never felt like I was playing an ugly person. That is, it was a character called Betty with these characteristics,” Orozco said, which circles back to how Betty broke the telenovela mold where female leads looked one way, “They called her ugly, but for me, Betty is not ugly. I mean, there are many more things and in this story, the focus is not on that either, it’s not about the fact that she’s “ugly” again, it’s that she’s her again.”
Betty la Fea, La Historia Continúa debuts on July 19, 2024, in 240 countries and territories worldwide.
