A bunny caught Infraganti: While sheathed in a sexy black dress, Renata Gonzalez acknowledges that posing nude was a springboard to fame. “I wanted to be a Play-boy girl,” says the girl from Tolima, who is currently trying her luck in the play Infraganti, on a national tour that will last until November, “but not forever”. She was sure that this title, obtained in 2003 and which made her the image of the adult channel in Latin America, was not going to last a lifetime. Six years have passed since then. “The weight of remaining in people’s memory as the woman who took her clothes off for a magazine does not depend so much on the circumstances as on yourself,” Renata points out. That is why today she is determined to prove that she can be a good actress.

With the characters she has played, she still can’t make many accounts, but the quality of her performances speaks very well of her future. Three months ago she arrived from studying English in the United States and was called for the casting of the character played by Sara Corrales in Infraganti. Only two days after the audition, the producers told her that her performance had stood out against those of Kathy Saenz, Carolina Guerra, Martha Restrepo and Carolina Acevedo.

Renata got the role, and although she can’t help but feel proud, she knows she faces a very important challenge. “Opportunities will always come, but I have to be ready to make the cut and not let them slip away,” she says enthusiastically. Her experience of performing in front of the 1,200 spectators who fill Bogotá’s Astor Plaza theater three times a week has been rewarding. “Theater is completely different from television because the audience approves or criticizes immediately,” she confesses, and she is concerned about making sure that in this comedy, which seeks to entertain the audience for an hour and 40 minutes, her funny and witty remarks are understood. Because she is convinced that what is funny is not only the character but the way she transmits the situations. “You have to get the last person in line to capture the gestures, and you have to get more strength to give life to a stratum 20 model, without a camera that comes close to your face”.

Unlike what happens to her in the theater, her expressions have been seen very closely on television and in film. Since 2007, Renata has been Marcela in the telenovela Pura sangre, and Susana in the Colombian-Spanish film Culpa ajena. Now she is Juliana in the play Infraganti, and Rocío in the new television production of Rosario Tijeras. None of these four women look like her, or so she thinks. “In Rosario Tijeras I am a girl who uses her charms to achieve her goal”, something that could be compared to what she herself did with her sculptural body at the beginning of her career, but Renata is quick to point out that she would never go over anyone’s head in order to climb the ladder. Of Juliana, the model who elopes with her best friend’s boyfriend in Infraganti, she only has experience on the catwalks. “She’s also a very brute,” she says with a smile, and Renata has plenty of intelligence to spare.

That’s why she decided to stay permanently in the country and put aside her advances in Los Angeles (United States) with the presentation of television programs such as Cine de las estrellas, of the Telefutura channel, and E-Latinmusic of the music channel HTV. He wants to continue acting and take advantage of the tools that Miguel García and Mario Jurado, two of his acting teachers, have given him.

When you start to see that you really have talent for acting, you also become aware that each project must have an absolutely different preparation,” he says, and he knows that he can have the best directors and great casts, but if he doesn’t understand what they are talking about, there’s not much to do. “Above anything else you have to like what you do,” he concludes.