PRODUCTION AND CASTING

Production Edit

Conception and writing Edit

Further information: § Themes and analysis

We wanted to make a very small project in a simple way; we wanted to cross lines we couldn't cross in previous projects, in terms of narrative and structure without any intermediaries.

—Writer Esther Martinez Lobato, October 2018[11]

The series was conceived by screenwriter Álex Pina and director Jesús Colmenar during their years of collaboration since 2008.[12] After finishing their work on the Spanish prison drama Locked Up (Vis a vis), they left Globomedia to set up their own production company, named Vancouver Media, in 2016.[12][13] For their first project, they considered either filming a comedy or developing a heist story for television,[12] with the latter having never been attempted before on Spanish television.[14] Along with former Locked Up colleagues,[d] they developed Money Heist as a passion project to try new things without outside interference.[11] Pina was firm about making it a limited series, feeling that dilution had become a problem for his previous productions.[15]

Initially entitled Los Desahuciados (The Evicted) in the conception phase,[15] the series was developed to subvert heist conventions and combine elements of the action genre, thrillers and surrealism, while still being credible.[12] Pina saw an advantage over typical heist films in that character development could span a considerably longer narrative arc.[16] Characters were to be shown from multiple sides to break the viewers' preconceptions of villainy and retain their interest throughout the show.[16] Key aspects of the planned storyline were written down at the beginning,[17] while the finer story beats were developed incrementally to not overwhelm the writers.[18] Writer Javier Gómez Santander compared the writing process to the Professor's way of thinking, "going around, writing down options, consulting engineers whom you cannot tell why you ask them that," but noted that fiction allowed the police to be written dumber when necessary.[18]

The beginning of filming was set for January 2017,[14] allowing for five months of pre-production.[19] The narrative was split into two parts for financial considerations.[19] The robbers' city-based code names, which Spanish newspaper ABC compared to the colour-based code names in Quentin Tarantino's 1992 heist film Reservoir Dogs,[20] were chosen at random in the first part,[21] although places with high viewership resonance were also taken into account for the new robbers' code names in part 3.[22] The first five lines of the pilot script took a month to write,[19] as the writers were unable to make the Professor or Moscow work as narrator.[15] Tokyo as an unreliable narrator, flashbacks and time-jumps increased the narrative complexity,[16] but also made the story more fluid for the audience.[19] The pilot episode required over 50 script versions until the producers were satisfied.[23][24] Later scripts would be finished once per week to keep up with filming.[19]

Casting Edit

Casting took place late in 2016, spanning more than two months.[25] The characters were not fully fleshed out at the beginning of this process, and took shape based on the actors' performances.[26] Casting directors Eva Leira and Yolanda Serrano were looking for actors with the ability to play empathetic robbers with believable love and family connections.[27] Antena 3 announced the ensemble cast in March 2017[3] and released audition excerpts of most cast actors in the series' aftershow Tercer Grado and on their website.[26]

The Professor was designed as a charismatic yet shy villain who could convince the robbers to follow him and make the audience sympathetic to the robbers' resistance against the powerful banks.[28] However, developing the Professor's role proved difficult, as the character did not follow archetypal conventions[25] and the producers were uncertain about his degree of brilliance.[15] While the producers found his Salva personality early on,[15] they were originally looking for a 50-year-old Harvard professor type with the looks of Spanish actor José Coronado.[15][29] The role was proposed to Javier Gutiérrez, but he was already committed to starring in the film Campeones.[30] Meanwhile, the casting directors advocated for Álvaro Morte, whom they knew from their collaboration on the long-running Spanish soap opera El secreto de Puente Viejo, even though his prime-time television experience was limited at that point.[29] Going through the full casting process and approaching the role through external analysis rather than personal experience, Morte described the professor as "a tremendous box of surprises" that "end up shaping this character because he never ceases to generate uncertainty," making it unclear for the audience if the character is good or bad.[25] The producers also found that his appearance of a primary school teacher gave the character more credibility.[15]

Pedro Alonso was cast to play Berlin, whom La Voz de Galicia would later characterize as a "cold, hypnotic, sophisticated and disturbing character, an inveterate macho with serious empathy problems, a white-collar thief who despises his colleagues and considers them inferior."[31] The actor's portrayal of the character was inspired by a chance encounter Alonso had the day before receiving his audition script, with "an intelligent person" who was "provocative or even manipulative" to him.[32] Alonso saw high observation skills and an unusual understanding of his surroundings in Berlin, resulting in unconventional and unpredictable character behaviour.[31] Similarities between Berlin and Najwa Nimri's character Zulema in Pina's TV series Locked Up were unintentional.[33] The family connection between the Professor and Berlin was not in the original script, but was built into the characters' backstory at the end of part 1 after Morte and Alonso had repeatedly proposed to do so.[34]

The producers found the protagonist and narrator, Tokyo, among the hardest characters to develop,[19] as they were originally looking for an older actress to play the character who had nothing to lose before meeting the Professor.[26] Úrsula Corberó eventually landed the role for bringing a playful energy to the table; her voice was heavily factored in during casting, as she was the first voice the audience hears in the show.[26] Jaime Lorente developed Denver's hallmark laughter during the casting process.[26] Two cast actors had appeared in previous TV series by Álex Pina: Paco Tous (Moscow) had starred in the 2005 TV series Los hombres de Paco, and Alba Flores (Nairobi) had starred in Locked Up. Flores was asked to play Nairobi without audition when Pina realised late in the conception phase that the show needed another female gang member.[15] For the role opposite to the robbers, Itziar Ituño was cast to play Inspector Raquel Murillo, whom Ituño described as a "strong and powerful woman in a world of men, but also sensitive in her private life".[35] She took inspiration from The Silence of the Lambs character Clarice Starling, an FBI student with a messy family life who develops sympathies for a criminal.[36]

The actors learned of the show's renewal by Netflix before the producers contacted them to return.[37] In October 2018, Netflix announced the cast of part 3; the returning main cast included Pedro Alonso, raising speculation about his role in part 3.[38] Among the new cast members were Argentine actor Rodrigo de la Serna, who saw a possible connection between his character's name and the Argentine football legend Martín Palermo,[39] and Locked Up star Najwa Nimri. Cameo scenes of Brazilian football star, and fan of the series, Neymar, as a monk were filmed for part 3, but were excluded from the stream without repercussions to the narrative until judicial charges against him had been dropped in late August 2019.[40][18] A small appearance by Spanish actress Belén Cuesta in two episodes of part 3 raised fan and media speculation about her role in part 4.[41]