Mexico City – Actor Gael García Bernal is diving into audio drama production with his company La Corriente del Golfo, in partnership with Audible, Amazon’s audiobook platform. Bernal narrates and produces both Hilde Krüger: fiction and war – a six-episode series detailing the story of a German actress and Nazi tasked with infiltrating Mexican politics in the 1930s - and a new adaptation of Franz Kafka‘s The Metamorphosis.
The Hilde Krüger series, based on a 2016 account from el País, portrays a Mexico teeming with espionage during a turbulent period. ”It’s exciting to do something about spies. This country was full of spies at that time.It was a cauldron and Mexico was a fantastic vessel for the struggle between spies,” Bernal told El País. He envisions the story’s structure as ideally suited for a radio soap opera format, a genre he feels has been lost in Mexico since the rise of commercial radio in the 20th century.
Bernal, alongside co-stars Ilse salas and Poncho Herrera in Hilde Krüger, and Mauricio Isaac and Cassandra Ciangherotti in The Metamorphosis, believes the human voice remains irreplaceable, even with advances in artificial intelligence.Despite preferring customary books, he appreciates audio productions for their ability to “enter other worlds.” He also noted a longing for a time “where one could gossip about things without capitalizing on one side or the other,” drawing parallels between the past world of espionage and the present day.
