Best friends? That was the question that Pancho Saavedra asked the actor and screenwriter Rodrigo Bastidas, ex-males, in Grill Partners (Channel 13).
—No, I’m not Marcelo Bielsa’s best friend.
However, they still established a close relationship when Rosario arrived in Chile in 2007. “He didn’t talk to anyone,” Bastidas recalled. “This gentleman was a mystery that no one knew what he thought.”
At that time, the actor was a neighbor Harold Mayne-Nicholls, president of the ANFP and architect in the arrival of the Argentine coach to La Roja.
In 2008, the film had been released Lokas, for which Bastidas was the screenwriter. He knew that the trans-Andean liked movies, so he gave him a copy on CD:
After that, Mayne-Nicholls told his neighbor:
“Marcelo Bielsa is going to call you.”
He didn’t believe her and forgot regarding it, until one day, while he was in his office, his cell phone rang. Unknown number. “Hello?” he replied. “With Rodrigo Bastidas?”, they asked him from the other line, with a calm and trans-Andean accent. Bastidas thought they were kidding him.
However, everything indicated that he was really the coach of La Roja himself. “I don’t know if I’m bothering him,” Rosario told him. “You speak with Marcelo Bielsa.” There the actor definitely recognized his voice. It was him.
“He was a very special guy”
“And we started talking and we talked for an hour,” the interpreter recalled. “And he told me very funny things”, he said, in fact, Bielsa commented to him: “People think that I watch football all day; No, I watch movies, what I like the most is movies and I watch two or three movies a day”.
In that, a dynamic began in which both exchange films with each other. Thus began a relationship in which Bastidas even invited him to his Apart theater, and he attended several times. “Of course, I always wondered if there would be any journalists”, to go unnoticed.
“You had to be very careful,” he said. In addition, “he was burdened that people tell what I am telling now, but I am telling it 12 years later.” However, “at the time I didn’t say anything, because it was enough for a rooster to say ‘I was with Bielsa’ and cut him off, because he didn’t like public things”.
“He was a very special guy,” he said. “And the number of anecdotes that I had, they were hilarious,” I conclude.
