Santo Domingo.- With the rawness that characterizes him, the Dominican actor, psychologist, and theater director Johnnié Mercedes opened his heart on Sin Rodeos and revealed the darkest moment of his career, “I thought about taking my own life after being rejected from the National School of Fine Arts”.
“I wanted to commit suicide”, Mercedes confessed to journalist Alix Padilla while remembering the day she walked from Bellas Artes to the Eduardo Brito National Theater.
He narrates that after a financial crisis, his family moved from his native province ‘Higuey’ to Haina, west of the Dominican capital, “I passed in front of Fine Arts and told my father that I wanted to study there. He said yes. When I went, there were many prepared youngsters; I was a novice, I didn’t know anything, and the tests were difficult”.
Two weeks later, he returned to Bellas Artes to read the list of the 24 selected from a group that exceeded 100 acting applicants, “I read them all, one by one, and mine was not there,” he highlighted.
“I walked to the National Theater, hugged a very large rubber tree that is at the Theater, told it my problems while I couldn’t stop crying, my goal was to commit suicide”, he confessed, visibly affected. From that pain, he said, was born the discipline that defines him today.
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The theater director also took the opportunity to launch a direct criticism of the lack of training in the country and the rise of influencers who proclaim themselves actors.
You can also read: Johnnié Mercedes speaks out about crime in Santiago
“The Dominican Republic is a country of many opportunities. Here we make a video for TikTok and we are actors. Here an engineer builds a bridge and it falls down the next day. Here a doctor operates on you and ruins your life,” emphasized Mercedes.
The actor, with more than 40 years of career and 70 films, also referred to the comparisons made between actors without formal training and those from Hollywood.
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“Many use the excuse that some Hollywood actors didn’t study acting. Don’t get it twisted, they come from developed countries, since their first year of high school they have read the complete works of William Shakespeare, they have general knowledge, they could even be engineers with basic knowledge; on the other hand, in the Dominican Republic, education is shit.” Here it is easy to be an actor, the only thing you have to do is turn on a little camera and speak poorly,” he indicated.
“This is the only country where some guy on TikTok laughs into a camera, tells a joke, speaks poorly, and is suddenly an actor, but he spells acting with a P,” he stressed.
For the psychologist as well, preparation is non-negotiable: “If you don’t know how to hold a mop, don’t ask me for an opportunity to clean my house. I get along very well with God, but I cannot ask Him for a movie in Hollywood without knowing English. First, I have to prepare myself. I am the opportunity.”
Discipline before luck
“I don’t believe in luck. I spent two months getting my hands dirty to play a mechanic. Today, they give someone a photographer role and they film the whole movie with the lens cap on,” concluded the expert in the performing arts.
