“This time the one who is going to be left with nothing is you, you fucking old bitch.” And we already have half story written. Revenge is one of the most popular themes in the history of fiction. From Euripides’ Medea to the biblical Salome and the Count of Monte Cristo to The engaged princess.
We don’t know if Daniel Écija has gone that far back to find inspiration in his new project, but it is clear that Eva and Nicole tries to persuade the viewer with a vendetta of the fat ones, the kind that makes a woman wait 18 years to say that phrase to her nemesis. And with so much conviction that we all know she will get her way. The question is how.
‘Eva and Nicole’: a trip to the most boastful Costa del Sol
The City Council of Torremolinos cut off traffic Benyamina Avenue for a few hours on October 21. It is a long avenue flanked by palm trees and blocks of seventies buildings: a setting that very well reflects the construction fever that promoted (and disfigured) the Costa del Sol decades ago.
The production company Good Mood Films, responsible for television projects such as Night D or series like The accident either Christ and King He took his filming crew to this location to set several scenes from the series. Eva and Nicoleone of the big bets of the season at Atresmedia.
The veteran Daniel Ecijapopular for series like Family doctor, Red Eagle either Journalists —where it coincided with Belen Ruedahis now ex-wife and protagonist of the series—together with Montse García, fiction director at Atresmedia, launched this project that has Hiba Abouk and Belén Rueda herself as great figures.
Belén is Nicole, one of the most powerful businesswomen in Marbella in the mid-80s, while Hiba is Eva, a mysterious woman who returns to Nicole’s life almost 20 years after they separated after their friendship (love triangle included) in Paris.
Marbella ‘vice’
It is not the first time, nor will it be the last, that two production companies launch themselves into exploiting a similar theme at the same time, with the opportunity (and risk) that this entails. Like when a bar opens next to another. And then another and another.
The vein to be exploited this season is the most ostentatious luxury on the Costa del Sol, but while Marbella places his story about the “UN of organized crime” in the present, Eva and Nicole prefers to go to the origin, when in this city no one made an invoice and concepts such as sustainability or climate neutrality were like science fiction: the 1980s.
While on the other side of the pond, Miami became the epicenter of the mafia against which Sonny Crocket and Rico Tubbs fought, on this side we did what we could from Marbella, a little before a certain Jesus Gil He took over the city’s mayorship in 1991, bringing Marbella kitsch to its maximum expression.
Of course, Marbella has never been all luxury, smoke and voluptuousness. There also live (and lived) many people from Marbella who dedicated themselves to their boringly legal business and to their “gray” lives without yachts, nightclubs or cocaine. But those lives are, apparently, much less interesting for fiction, which always looks askance at what is going on in Hollywood: and in Hollywood they are exploiting the “badass roll” to the point of nausea. Why should we be less?
From Paris to Torremolinos passing through Morocco
Written by several hands and led by Écija, the leitmotiv of the series was to transport the viewer to the 80s Costa del Sol. And that’s what we see in Eva and Nicolestarting with Nicole’s nightclub, the center of operations for the character played by Belén Rueda, who dominates the city with an iron fist. marbelli night in 1989 with his partner Manuel, played by Andres Velencoso.
Over there we see the crème de la crème of the Spanish entertainment of the time in which, of course, there were also various characters from more or less shady business. But for this environment to be credible, those responsible for the production design of the series have had to thoroughly work out all the details, because the Costa del Sol has changed a little in the last 40 years.
From the locations that we see in Torremolinos or in Marbella itself or the Costume Design even the selection of the eighties sports cars in which the characters move, Eva and Nicole seeks to capture that creaky luxury that dominated the Costa del Sol in the 1980s.
But a series of this profile cannot be satisfied with a single location. And in addition to the Paris that we see in the flashbackswhen the first meeting between the young Nicole and Eva is narrated, and the bulk of the series is filmed in different locations on the Costa del Sol, the production of the series also traveled to Madrid or Morocco to complete this series of eight episodes that aspires to conquer the public this summer with this “classic novel and beast that talks about the important things in life,” according to its producer Daniel Écija.
