Joan Pera: "I was preparing the end-of-year performances with Mainat."

Joan Pera is an actor and dubbing artist born in Mataró with a long professional career. Currently, we can see him in the docu-reality 3Cat humor Eight things to do before you die and until October 26, at the Teatro Condal in the comedy A surrogate father-in-law.

Actor Joan Pera studied at the Maristes Valldemia school in Mataró, where he had Josep Maria Mainat as a classmate. "I really liked school because they let me do whatever I wanted. I studied, but what I liked most was acting. I prepared the end-of-year performances, sometimes with Mainat," explains the actor. I ask him if they performed together. "One end-of-year performance we did The Merchant of Venice, and another, The death of Julius Caesar", he recalls.

Actors have a reputation for being shy. "In class, I already liked going on stage, telling stories about the Visigoth kings or sacred history, whatever, because in a way, you were like the protagonist," Pera explains. Where did this passion come from? "It was all about light, it all about spotlights, it all amazed me," he confesses.

After school, at the theater. "First, I went home and tried to help with whatever they sometimes asked of me. But as soon as I could, I would escape and run to the theater. When I was younger, I had played a little sport, but it didn't appeal to me as much. At ten, I started going on stage. At the Sala Cabanyes, in Mataró Saleta, there was a theater like La Sala Cabanyes, and that's where I played my first role," explains Joan Pera.

My mother owned a grocery store, a fruit shop. "My parents worked a lot, and so did my siblings. I was the youngest of five siblings, so they let me study." And my father? "My father had a physical disability and worked with my mother in the fruit shop," says the actor.

Most cherished memory

As a child, when people asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he didn't say actor. "I said other things because it wasn't a job or anything, it was a hobby, something I really liked. At home we didn't have much money to study. I remember Mom once saying to me: 'You could be a tailor.' They were always looking for jobs for you to do," explains Joan Pera. But he studied. "The teacher told his parents: 'This kid could study.' And my parents then made the sacrifice, and I started studying literature when everyone else was studying science. And then I started standing up, but it didn't matter anymore because I found a way to do theater at university and wherever I was," explains the actor.

His most treasured childhood memory is in a theater. "The day my mother took me to the theater in Barcelona. I was 12 years old and lived in Mataró, so going to Barcelona was already like an adventure. And I saw that big, professional theater... I was so amazed that I told my mother: "When I grow up, I want to do this." And my mother told me: "You won't be able to do it; life," Pera recalls. But he made his debut, precisely, at that theater, the Calderón. "About six years later, in Suicide is prohibited in springPeople applauded my exit. This, for a 17- or 18-year-old kid, was shocking. I thought I'd go to Hollywood from there. I'm still waiting for the call, right? But it was really nice," the actor continues.

And he never stopped acting. "I never thought I'd make a living from it. In fact, for a while, when I was studying, I taught kids, like all the kids back then, and that's how you earned a little bit of a living. The thing is, then I started appearing on TV. I'd started earning some money doing radio on Ràdio Barcelona. And then with TV, you started earning more," he admits.