2023-08-26 06:54:33
SEMANA: For a few weeks now, he has been performing at the Hombres a la plancha show at the National Theater. Is that facet of a singer the one you enjoy the most?
Marcelo Cezán: I enjoy all my facets. I like to act, sing, host an event, emcee or influencer. I always remember one night when I got home at dawn, following a tour, and my mom asked me how it went. And I, who despite her tiredness had a smile, told her: “Very good.” “It’s just that everyone enjoys it like you,” she said. And it’s true. I carry happiness with me despite the problems. That phrase from my mother more than 20 years ago marked me for life.
SEMANA: Aren’t you surprised by the fame that came to you with your time as a leading man in Colombia, Mexico and Venezuela?
MC: They were beautiful times and I enjoyed them. I don’t miss them, I live in the present. Now I am reaping what I sowed, above all, in the relationship that I have built with the public, on the street, in the neighborhoods, in these 30 years of my career. My life is not the same as it was 20 years ago, when I lived from hotel to hotel, as a singer and actor. But at this stage I can enjoy my family, my son, my wife and my father, 90 years old, who lives with us.
SEMANA: You have been very transparent with your life story. With the good and the bad of his past. What do you regret?
MC: You’re welcome! I am a Christian, I am linked to a Church, which has helped me not only in my spiritual process, but also physically and financially, and to be very grateful for what I have experienced. With the light and the darkness of my life. If by telling my story I can serve as an inspiration to someone, then I will continue sharing not only my experiences, but also how I got out of that hole, of those hard moments. Let them say: “If Marcelo might, I can too.”
With his wife, the singer Michelle Gutty, who managed to get him out of bachelorhood at age 50. | Photo: /ups/wcdata/image/high/0PZQSLV3.JPG
SEMANA: Don’t you feel very overexposed revealing details as complicated as drugs and jail?
MC: I don’t do it to generate headlines or show. I do it out of empathy, for so many people who have gone through that same darkness. It seems to me a noble and honest life purpose.
SEMANA: What did it take to change your life?
MC: A very brave background touch. extreme. It involved physical and emotional ruin, nobody wanted to work with me, with debts of more than 400 million pesos a la Dian. I was messy, I didn’t return VAT. I was a rebel of the system, I thought they were thieves. You get into that dark world and it’s not easy to get out. I was a spendthrift, a bohemian, a financial mess. And sometimes you need to hit rock bottom. Like when you’re drowning in a pool and they tell you that it’s best to go to the bottom to have a floor to jump off of. And that was what God allowed. One day I accepted that reality. I said: “I’m broke, I’m ugly, sick” and I had to stop and move on.
SEMANA: But have you ever felt defeated?
SEMANA: You get married at an age when many have already had several divorces. Why did he take the risk at 50?
MC: I had made the decision not to get married. I thought I wasn’t born for that. He had had several setbacks. I have been a man of few relationships, although many people imagine that I have been a womanizer. About five or six and all of several years, intense, passionate. After the last crash I said I’m going to be the eternal bachelor. A hermit type who would buy a little house to live alone in the country.
Cezán is one of the voices of the Hombres a la plancha National Theater show, in which he rediscovered his career as a singer. | Photo: Andres Uribe Naranjo
SEMANA: And how did Michelle Gutty convince you?
SEMANA: And how do you imagine a conversation with your son when he asks regarding his past?
MC: Frank and open. I would like to impact his life and inspire him to understand that he can be everything he sets his mind to. He would tell her that it’s not regarding being perfect either. Sometimes the neighborhood gamín that played soccer in Palmira comes out and I have to tame it. Many do not know, for example, that I have a deep relationship with homeless people.
SEMANA: And what led you to that?
MC: Life itself. Outside of where we present ourselves with Hombres a la plancha, there is a street inhabitant with whom I talk on the way out. And, beyond a piece of bread that I give him, we talk and I tell him that I understand his situation, that it is circumstantial and I don’t judge him. And I listen to his story and I say, “You can get out of there.” One day a former street dweller approached me at the exit of Bravíssimo, when we were recording in La Jiménez. He was already well dressed and he told me that I had saved his life. He didn’t understand what he was talking regarding. Then he told me that, years ago, he had offered him bread with coffee and I let him tell me regarding his life. And he remembered that I had told him that he was not a throwaway, but a talented person who made a mistake. That day he came out of his hut willing to transform his life and go to a rehabilitation center. He began working with his family and picking up his talent on the saxophone. That day I understood: with only 800 pesos and one minute you can do something for someone.
SEMANA: But are you one of those who walk around with the Bible under your arm?
MC: Not at all. The Bible talks regarding being meek and being guided. I cannot go around telling people that they are going to be damned and I am going to be saved. I prefer to be a living testimony. We are all always going to have a bad side, and the challenge of life is to get ahead in the midst of it.
Bravíssimo and the new group of presenters of the weekend program. Credit: City Photographer: City | Photo: /ups/wcdata/image/high/0PKGXX93.JPG
SEMANA: You had, however, a long time when you were not so meek…
MC: Fifteen years of my life. I was rebellious. Embedded in rumba and bohemia. On drugs. Always looking for the temporary euphoria and that led me to ruin.
SEMANA: You must be the rare case of someone who gets fired from a company and who later ends up being called to work there once more.
MC: I love Bravíssimo. I have received juicy offers from other channels, five-year contracts. A second content for my wife. I have analyzed it as a family and I always end up staying in the program and even for less money. Every day, before going on the air, we pray and I think that’s why we transmit such good energy. The truth is that they fired me because I messed up horribly with a journalist from Casa Editorial El Tiempo. One day I followed the program straight from a party and offended it on the air. Seven years later I ran into him at an event, he imagined that I was going to hit him and ‘get paid’ for what they had done to me, but I lost my heartfelt forgiveness. Days later they were calling me once more for the program.
SEMANA: Marcelo, where was the dentist?
MC: I was a dentist to study something for my dad, who demanded it of me. And today I thank him, even though I knew he was never going to practice. But the funny thing is that now that my dad has been sick I discovered that I was able to channel a vein and take some vital signs. That day I said: that’s why I studied dentistry.
SEMANA: And where did the soccer player go?
MC: In that matter there was a frustration. I had everything to be a footballer. But in 1980 my father died of fright, he believed that with that I had no future, soccer players at that time had a reputation for being lazy. And that’s where the race came to me.
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