Pedro Alonso in search of ancestral wisdom in Mexico on Netflix

Deepening the quest for oneself, beyond the slippery heights of glory and the vagaries of life: the Spanish actor Pedro Alonso left for Mexico on the road to ancestral wisdom.

Mourning of the father, breakup, new love, and this character from “Berlin” which earned him international notoriety: “It’s true that in the last ten years, I have experienced everything”. “At the same time, I continue an inner work that is very present in my life, through the paths of meditation and more precisely, shamanism,” he continues during a return to Mexico for the presentation of his documentary “ En la nave del encanto” (“In the Ship of Enchantment”), available January 7 on Netflix.

Surrounded by friends, Alonso films himself in a “road movie” which goes through the ritual of temazcal (pre-Hispanic medicinal steam bath) and ayahuasca (hallucinogenic plant used in the rites of indigenous cultures, mainly in Peru ).

This spiritual journey from Chiapas to Oaxaca -among others- constitutes a new stage in a journey begun 20 years ago.

“My beginnings as an actor were very quick,” he remembers, mentioning two years in the Fura dels Baus troupe, and the first roles that attracted the attention of Pedro Almodovar’s production house.

And then ruin: “At the age of thirty, I felt that the train had left without me.” “Over time, I realized that I had severe depression. I started to meditate, out of pure survival instinct, to paint.”

The actor began his spiritual life at age 23 with a four-day fast in the mountains in Catalonia. “Afterwards, I started reading Carlos Castaneda like crazy,” he says of the bestselling author of the “beat generation” of the 70s.

The discovery of ancestral wisdom came with his first trips to Mexico. The idea for the documentary arose “during the pandemic”: “I found what I had written when I went looking for peyote (another hallucinogenic plant, editor’s note) in the desert.”

He anticipates the criticism: “Ah, ok, this actor has a certain notoriety and now he wants to be the guru of modernity… That’s not my intention.” “I speak from my doubts, my research, my attempts, my dark sides, trying to map a path to self-knowledge.”

“I don’t think it’s a path for everyone,” he says of ancestral plants, which are often banned.

“The Americans, with Nixon, decreed that all drugs embody the devil,” sighs Alonso, who claims the right to doubt and debate. “I don’t have a clear position on whether we should legalize everything at once.”

“I saw in the West what the relationship of young people is with drugs. It’s madness. It has nothing to do with a gentleman blowing on a leaf,” he says, in homage to shamans. “I would not recommend everyone to take ayahuasca (…) On the other hand, I could recommend everyone to meditate” to “learn to reconnect with yourself and the cycles of the earth” .

Accepting his paradoxes, Alonso says he loves the chaos of Mexico and recognizes the progress of Western medicine, while questioning the current destiny of the West.

“We live in a toxic world,” he says. “And it shows in the statistics. There had never been so much depression.” “From the age of 45 you are dead in the West,” he believes he observes.

In the meantime, Alonso resumes filming in January for a new season of “Berlin”, a series derived from Casa de papel.