I, Addict: The story behind the critically acclaimed new Disney+ series by the person who lived it (EXCLUSIVE)

Javier Giner is the co-creator and co-director of new Disney+ series I, Addict, which stars Oriol Pla and is about a man in his 30s who voluntarily checks into a detox centre in Barcelona to overcome his addictions to drugs, alcohol, and sex. It is based on Giner’s same-titled autobiographical novel. Here, Giner shares with Attitude his deeply personal notes on the making of the film, and the real-life story behind it.

Although many years have passed and the successive forms that this story has taken (one of the most terrifying, tormented, luminous and healing moments of my existence) allow me enough distance to be able to speak of it as fiction, since I have lived it, I have described it in a book, I have scripted it and then directed, it’s true that at times I lose distance and I feel this adaptation like a second skin. There are days when I remember traumatic moments in my life with the faces of the actors and with the frames of the series. That’s how my head works. I think I’m still not fully aware that my most vulnerable intimacy is going to be seen all over the world and that there is a series whose protagonist bears my name and surname. Or I’m aware, but I still don’t quite believe it. I don’t know when the light bulb will go on or if my survival strategy is going to be to live as if this is not about me. It’s a trademark: I’ve always been a bit of a kamikaze. I realise things late or at my own pace, when they are hopeless. And here I am now: sticking with what I’ve done and trying to explain myself.

I think it’s not hard to imagine what this project means emotionally to me. I don’t feel like I’m premiering a series, I feel like I’m laying my soul bare. It’s not hyperbole, I perceive it that way. If that maxim of the script that says writes of what you know is true, I give myself with your permission an honours degree for putting it into practice. 

The only thing I can say in my favour is that I don’t know how to do it any other way and that I am the first one surprised that this series exists and has had the opportunity to carry it out in these terms. (I always believed – and here I thank Disney, Laura Rubirola and the entire team that supported me without fissures in this purpose – that a story of these characteristics only made sense if it was told from the most radical truth). But I never imagined, not even in the best of dreams, that today I would be writing these lines because I, Addict is going to see the light. The reality is that I should have debuted a long time ago with two films whose financing finally fell through (something very common in this industry) and I have ended up debuting with the most personal-painful-visceral-daring-intimate story possible and the one that I always thought I could never shoot. (Due to external factors but also internal ones – yes, I have been very afraid and I have doubted a lot). However, now, after having gone through those meanders and the intelligence that having a temporal perspective gives you, I think it makes all the sense in the world that it is like this. I can’t conceive of a project that symbolises me more than this one (metaphorically and literally) to present myself in society. As I say, my soul, my sensitivity, my spirit, my name are an intrinsic part of it. In it I show myself under all kinds of lights and lie myself on the operating bed for the amusement of strangers. Everything I am is in each of the frames of this series and in each of the creative decisions made over the last three years. If you think about it, it is a very powerful message against the cynicism and pessimism prevailing these days. Sometimes things, with their twists and turns and distractions, have a happy ending.

The first thing that is important to note is that this series is not therapy or a megalomaniac and narcissistic act of public catharsis. I have never aspired to create and direct emotional porn or a self-help fable or to be the protagonist of anything or to pedagogy with my mistakes. Nor is it the largest family constellation ever made. Everything that needed to be traversed and worked out was done in the privacy of a therapeutic process that I carried out many years ago. I didn’t need to do this series to heal, or grow, evolve or go through anything. Nor to prove to anyone that I am a survivor or to set myself up as an example of anything. I’m not.

Nor is it something he has done alone. On the contrary, I have had an immense army of people with a lot of talent who have walked with me, have left their soul and have put as much of themselves as I have.

So what is it? Why did you make it, you may ask me? 

There is a maxim by which I have governed myself in its development and production, from the first line of script to the last cut of editing, which may serve to answer these questions. A kind of self-mandate-imposition, of a very valuable diamond in the rough, which I have protected to the maximum with tooth and nail and that has served as a beacon in the many moments in which I felt terrified, overcome or lost. (I assure you that there are many throughout any creative process). It is a message that I have transmitted over and over again to all the people in the team and that they have also made their own. 

As with the book, I have made this series to accompany many people who have either gone through, or are going through or unfortunately will go through something similar to what I went through. This series exists and makes sense to them.

I have made this series for Javier who was so broken and so that perhaps, if he had seen it, he could have named or identified things that happened to him and asked for help and saved himself a lot of pain. When I made it, I didn’t think about the public or the specialised critics, but about all those people and myself many years ago. Anonymous people who go through hell and who struggle daily to face themselves. People who deserve to be heard and understood and supported and loved in their loneliness, in their shame, in their guilt, in their illness, in their frustration, in their stumbling blocks and in their confusion. 

Often, I don’t discover anything new, addiction and mental health are issues treated in an uninformed and frivolous way, with recriminations, moral superiority, callousness, and dehumanisation. Often, I still do not discover anything new, the patient is stoned and condemned gratuitously by calling him vicious or incapable or selfish or a monster, without knowledge of what that means and with a total absence of empathy. And I know the immense damage that this causes, because it caused it to me, because I was one of them and I know perfectly well what they are going through.

That is why I have made this series and that is why I have made it the way I have done it: to dignify and humanise mental illness and the patient and to encourage them, to try to embrace them with the best weapon I have at my disposal: fiction. To explain to him or her that there are many of us like him or her. So that he knows that he is not alone and that, with a lot of effort and pain, he can live again. To defend the marginalised and the misunderstood and the silent and the losers and the people who get confused and go astray. To give them the space, the importance and the place they do not have in a reality that is increasingly determined to look the other way and judge by ignorance and disinterest. To put on the table important debates that we need to deal with as a society and try to shed some light where there is only darkness, reproach and avoidance.

The entire adaptation of my life to an audiovisual fiction is crossed by these thoughts and these personal objectives. It is an adaptation based on the commitment to life, affections, humanity, emotions and the importance of asking for help and not being ashamed of not being able to heal alone. An adaptation that tries to dynamite the story of the unattainable hero, because, as the protagonist himself says in the last chapter: human beings are neither heroes nor villains but an amalgam of all of them. And, honestly, I’m a little tired of so many chimerical tales of meritocracy, will, and self-sufficiency that only cause discouragement and frustration. They have never been my thing, to be honest.

Also, of course, I have done it to break a spear in favor of thousands of anonymous people who save lives every day: therapists and social educators. To try to explain how much we all need to learn to speak more and better. 

I hope I have succeeded. I’m not so naive as to believe that fiction can heal or change the world, I wish it had that power. But I do fervently believe in fiction as a companion, as a story where you can reflect on yourself, where you can emotionally experience other realities, where you can broaden your humanity and a safe space where you can feel understood and less alone.

Oriol Pla had written in his notebook, on the cover, a phrase that we shared together one afternoon in the solitude of the rehearsal room in one of our marathon days over months and months: “It’s not about you.” It’s a nice and accurate way to sum up what I’ve tried to do: tell me, but not about myself. All of us who have been part of the project understood from the beginning, and I transmitted it, that nothing we did “was about us.” In some way a bit hippie-esoteric, we were all tools and transmitters of a story that has a lot of uniqueness, but also, unfortunately, common in our days. It doesn’t matter if the main character is called like me. It’s not about me. It is not about Oriol or Nora or Marina or Victoria or Omar or Bernabé. It’s not about any of us. 

We are simply the representation of all those who do not have spaces to explain themselves. There are only two real names in the series, as was already the case in the book: mine and that of my social educator, Anais López (played in a sensitive, humble and powerful way by Nora Navas). This is a very conscious decision: I have considered it a priority to protect the real people who hide behind some of the characters, and I have never wanted the risk and exposure that I set for myself and what I decided to tell to affect them. He could not live with the feeling of being a vampire of his misfortunes. Only mine. The fact that the protagonist of the series is called like me and the fiction is in the first person has a good reason: it is the only way in which I feel authorised to talk about all the topics that the series deals with. I could have done it hidden behind a pseudonym, but I felt, and feel, that this distanced me from the radical honesty with which I have tried to approach this fiction. As in group therapy, the only way to communicate and bond with the other is from the deepest self, from the abandonment of the disguise or the lies we tell to “look good”, from the constructions that we raise to be loved and accepted. At the same time, I understand that this is a very personal decision that can only involve me. No one else. 

I know that many people will wonder how much fiction there is in this series and how much of reality, so I take advantage of these lines to say it: everything that happens in the series is real and that is the commitment I made to myself as a creator. That does not mean that things in life happened as they do in the series: like all audiovisual fiction, a transformation and a new language are necessary, that of drama. An adaptation of this type is devilish because it is based on a fundamentally internal journey and, as you all know, in the audiovisual (a medium of image) the interiorities must be external in order for it to work. With this I try to say that we have obviously transformed life to be able to create a series with it. But we have not invented beyond reality. There are certain acts that Javier Giner’s character performs in the series that I did not carry out in reality, but that other people did. There are details, acts and dialogues that do not belong to the people who represent them in the series. My family is a representation of reality, but also of millions of details and phrases from other families of treatment partners. But everything, from the first to the last detail, has happened in reality.

There are people who have celebrated how “brave” I am when watching the series. I honestly don’t think it is. I do not say this with false humility. My commitment to the truth of the series has always been non-negotiable. I would not have known or wanted to do it any other way. What I do know I’ve been (and I try tremendously hard to be) is honest. I have tried in writing and directing to convey in a real way the raw emotion that a detoxification implies, abandoning the commonplaces, the obvious, the melodrama and the emotional underlines of pastiche. To be able to represent in a real way the mixture of darkness and light that living implies, comedy and tragedy, until reaching a special and unique tone that mutates in each chapter. 

I suppose it all comes down to the fact that I have tried to capture life, to represent it, something that is impossible to do from the start. So if after watching it you think that it has not gone all wrong, be clear: we have worked hard to make it so, but surely luck has helped us. I already told you at the beginning of the text: I’m a bit of a kamikaze.

The series. The chapters. The themes.

Anais López uses a phrase to describe the detoxification process and drug addicts that I love: “they are like an onion and it is about peeling away layers, in order to reach the heart of the real person who hides behind so many habits and lies and characters and to be able to save them”. After going through it in the first person, I can certify that it is an accurate way of describing a very complex process to explain.

Something that was difficult for me to understand (and that created a lot of insecurities and resistance) was the conviction that in the clinic they were trying to change me, to brainwash me, to become someone else. It was much later when I realised that it was not about that, but about helping the real Javier, who existed hidden and crushed by layers and layers of disease. Thus, managing to detoxify brought as a gift to allow me to be, perhaps for the first time, more Javier than ever. 

Detoxification is a path of deconstruction, renunciation, self-knowledge, unlearning… to learn again. Like any pathology or mental health disorder, it is complex to describe and often words seem incapable of conveying reality. The first step on the road is to stop using the substance. But that’s just the beginning. From that moment on, true recovery begins since it is an emotional illness (compulsion, consumption, the spiral of self-destruction are only its most visible symptoms): and on that journey all the issues that make us what we are, human beings, are explored and questioned, treated, analysed and reinforced. Often, a detox is about re-learning how to live and love yourself, eliminating the ability to self-harm along the way.

That’s why I like to say that I, Addict is a series about addiction, but only in a first layer, the most superficial and striking. Addiction is the macguffin that encompasses everything else. Because addiction is never just addiction. That’s why for me I, Addict is about many things, almost all of them that make us and structure us as people. Almost all those that we do not talk about openly, honestly, because they cause us pain and shame and because we have been educated to hide them. I think the themes of the series, surprisingly to someone who doesn’t know this universe, are much closer, more relatable, and more understandable than I might imagine: loneliness, misunderstanding, mental health, self-demands, family inheritances, emotional bonds, honesty, irrational beliefs, the quick-fix society, hyperstimulation, and image.  traumas and their internal wounds, limits, dependence in all its forms, forgiveness, complexes, inexhaustible dissatisfaction, emptiness, ambition, fear, reconciliation with oneself and with the world, uncertainty, group power, self-punishment, over-stimulation, silence, empathy, etc. 

It is another way of saying that the patient is not as unknown or as distant from anyone as he seems. The experience of being human is something that is common to the fact of being alive and as someone said a long time ago “nothing human is alien to me.”

For me it’s not a series about sick people, it’s a series about human beings.

I’ve beaten around the bush. I go back to detoxification, which is what I was talking about. Detoxification: a path of stages, as is the series itself. 

In its dramatic structure this concept is meshed together. Each title of the chapters represents a stage in the protagonist’s journey, a new layer of onion: ever deeper, ever more intimate, ever more painful, ever more difficult, ever closer to the viewer. The addiction, the clinic, the monster, the bonds, the family, the farewell. They are all important moments common to detoxification, although in the series they are personified by those I went through. As in a video game, the protagonist needs to go through screens on his way to healing. That means that the Javier of chapter three would not exist without Javier having gone through the discomfort of chapter two, in the same way that the Javier of chapter five would not have the necessary tools to immerse himself in the family problem if he had not gone through the different stages that precede the chapter with its consequent development of emotional management, tolerance to frustration, pain and self-knowledge. 

You will see, on a much more concrete terrain, that each chapter is different from the previous one in concept and execution and that Oriol’s interpretation as the series progresses is stripped of mannerisms and disguises (in short, of the interpretation itself) to rest more and more naked, calm and more connected with himself until the final moment: the centre of the character’s heart, the centre of the onion. Truth without artifice. I confess that Oriol’s gaze throughout the series moves me tremendously: I see it progress and empty itself of suffering, pretense and despair, episode by episode; to be increasingly exposed, authentic and real. Achieving this emptiness, this replete presence without protective armour, without anchors, is diabolically difficult and risky for a performer. It is the moment when everything is at stake because he levitates in the void, without stepping on solid ground. But I’m getting ahead of myself, I’ll talk about Oriol later. 

What I was trying to say is that the series, within a common tone and whole, like the protagonist himself, the backbone of the story, also mutates. Thus, each of the episodes of the series exemplifies Javier’s emotional state in all its aspects. I wanted the emotional experience as viewers of the different episodes to be in accordance with the emotional experience of the protagonist. The chapters are the way they are because Javier is like that at that moment in the story. And the viewer, consequently, goes through the same sensations as Javier. Let me explain myself better: the first is compulsive and overwhelming, confused and wildly painful and dry, the second is uncomfortable, silent, emotional and strange, the third is an explosion of… Enough spoilers. The only thing I can say is that the protagonist’s inner and outer journey, as he progresses, abandons the distance between the viewer and the patient and leads to an identification with him. Javier, each chapter is closer to anyone. I have tried to make the series evolve for the viewer by subtly transforming: what at first is the story “of the other”, a lost and sick person, ends up becoming a story “about me”. This is a bit like what happens in the therapeutic process: as the addiction progresses, it has less and less presence to treat other, much deeper things.

Who doesn’t have a family? Who doesn’t reflect on their relationship with emotional bonds and sex? Who does not live with the weight of uncertainty and vital anguish? Who doesn’t learn to manage their frustration and anger?

After all, as Iker, the character played by Omar Ayuso, says at one point in chapter four: “Who is not addicted to something?”

The actors.

I, Addict is, above all, a series of actors. It is an audiovisual artifact that rests almost entirely on their faces, their looks and their gestures. 

It was clear to me from the beginning that actors and actresses would be my priority. I sensed that I could escape with a location that was not ideal or I would have ways to make up a wrongly chosen costume, even a poorly planned shot, but I sensed that if an interpretation was forced or artificial it would ruin the truth and emotion of the story and with them the series. In addition to being adrift, sick, excessive and complex characters, the risk was much greater since they are very complicated roles to know and play. Let’s say that everything conspired so that the places in which to be out of tune multiplied by a thousand. 

Really, I think about it now, I have had that feeling in all the processes and stages of the project: the danger that continually lurked behind the millions of corners in which the precarious and fragile balance of fiction could be shattered and consequently destroy verisimilitude. So I decided, from practically the script, that the actors and actresses of this project would be my most important supporters and cronies to whom I would dedicate much of the effort and time in the direction of I, Addict. 

Without them there was no series.

From this decision came many more that made the preparation and filming a quasi-theatrical experience. We rehearse for a long time (much longer than is usual in audiovisuals) individually, in groups, in pairs. We created immersive experiences and did improvisation exercises in character, movement workshops, hundreds of creative games. We created a huge group where trust, affection and support developed for months. We leave behind vanities, egos, struggle, competition. We created a family, in short. 

Many of the actors and actresses had direct access to the real people they play or to very similar people. They all worked together with Anais López (the real therapist) on the problems of their roles and studied with her details such as movements or ways of speaking or ways of looking. Several of them visited my clinic, met people who were currently in treatment and even took part in group therapies and real workshops. Some people had direct access to spaces and places and people in my life that no one had ever met before.

During this process, which lasted several months, we did everything, as in a kind of creative camp-residence. I came to put into practice ideas, tricks and discoveries of a freaked out director that now make me blush: Oriol and Nora, for example, never rehearsed together to keep their “confrontation” on screen and the uncertainty of having to measure and challenge each other on camera was absolutely fresh. One way I found to try to get them to experience frustration and deprivation was to not allow them to have their phones during filming (I only left Nora and the crew, as would happen in a clinic). If they got bored during breaks, they talked to each other, they created a group, they couldn’t escape Instagram or WhatsApp. 

In short, every little decision was made by and for them. The veracity, viscerality and palpitation, honesty, nakedness and conflict that he pursued in each of the sequences required it to be so. More than playing characters I needed, I insisted that all of them, from the first to the last, inhabit them completely. For that I needed them to arrive prepared and safe for the shoot… which in turn allowed me that everyone on set was free to throw themselves into the void.

For example, if you notice, in I, Addict the camera is completely at the service of the actors, not the actors at the service of the camera. That led us to decide to use the handheld camera as a visual language throughout the shoot, which allowed us organic and authentic movements that were in turn marked by those of the actors. There is no heavy machinery in I, Addict, 99.9% of its shots are handheld (except for a very specific moment in which we do use a crane, but I don’t reveal it so as not to spoil anything). This gave us the gift of being able to create a space of reality, organicity, movement, presence and risk. The electricity of some of the scenes is real, because on a safe framework of meticulous work there was room for things to happen that had not been previously marked.

That means that, if the series remains standing, if it transmits truth and emotion, it is for each of them, for their meticulous, human and courageous work.

I am a firm believer that there is nothing more powerful in the audiovisual than a close-up and an actor/actress in a state of grace, in mastery of his instrument. There is a lot of this thesis in the image and work of the actors of I, Addict. I admire the work of the performer madly (I admit that much more than technical aspects, which often bore me). I enjoy every second of working with the actors and actresses like a little child. The process of construction, of discovery, of trial and error, of common adventure… Shaping emotions, silences… Give me a rehearsal room, several actors and I’ll be happy. I’m a constant advocate that a movie or a series can be wonderful even when there isn’t good lighting or the camera frames aren’t perfect. But it never will be if the performances and the script are not.

I have been immensely lucky to be able to count on them, not only for their unquestionable quality as performers but for their human quality. I take this opportunity to thank you infinitely for your dedication and the full trust placed in me when it comes to tackling the project. Their generosity, compassion and sensitivity at work and their ability to put themselves in my hands has been a source of continuous excitement, pride and joy during preparation and filming. Each and every one of them came to the project with the best of dispositions: prepared for anything to tell the story we wanted to tell and we walked together, without separating, through each of the nooks and crannies of the series. It seems silly to say it, but it is not common for so many actors to be so attuned to the story they tell and to give themselves body and soul to it. I know, because I saw it every day on set, how they all made the characters their own and respected them, cared for them and understood them and defended them as if they were themselves. We managed to form a commune of geeks that is still together today, many months after filming ended. I can say, without fear of being wrong, that several of the most precious moments of my professional life were lived watching them work on set. It was magic, I don’t know how to describe it any other way.

As a result, now when I watch the series we’ve done, I see a huge orchestra in which every instrument is in tune and I’m excited to watch them. That is why, if there is something I am proud of in I, Addict, it is the meticulous work of each of the actors, with Oriol at the helm.

The case of Oriol, as the protagonist, deserves its own space. I have to control myself because I could be writing and chattering about Oriol all my life. I bore anyone every time they ask me about Oriol. I love Oriol. My mouth fills up talking about Oriol. I feel him as my brother, my confidant, my boyfriend (without sex), my close friend, my accomplice.

We didn’t know each other. Let’s start there. I remember attending the premiere of Uncertain Glory in Madrid and being stunned by his work. I felt the same as I had felt the first time I saw Victoria Abril or Candela Peña: I had the feeling of having witnessed a force of nature in a state of grace. That same night I asked Agustí Villaronga where that actor had come from. From that day on, I always wanted to work with him. I had the feeling that Oriol and I were going to understand each other perfectly. Then I followed his work and made sure I didn’t miss anything he did. I guess that makes me a fan of Oriol Pla for years. 

So when I started to think about who could interpret me (I assure you that it is not an easy decision) I remembered that night. This was the opportunity.

Curiously, and I made it public because it is a precious moment that Oriol and I now treasure, I spoke again with Agustí Villaronga about this project and about the possibility of offering it to Oriol. I asked him what it was like to work with him, if he thought we would get along, if he thought it was the right choice. Agustí didn’t hesitate for a second: he told me not to think about it, that there was no better actor than Oriol for a series like this. That he and I were going to be an unbeatable combo. That we were going to make each other grow. I feel, perhaps in a melodramatic way, and I have spoken about it many times with Oriol himself, that Agustí blessed us and that is why we have felt his presence in many of the filming days. We like to think that this titan of cinema gave us permission and wished us luck in our common adventure and that if the experience went so well it was because Agustí was taking care of us.

Working with Oriol has been, without a doubt, my most intimate, most rigorous, most special and most exciting work. We spent almost a year preparing the character and the series together. Oriol knows me like few people know me and I know him like few people know him. It has been a work of complete symbiosis. I can’t imagine an actor capable of approaching and developing this series with me better than Oriol: a person and performer endowed with an unfathomable sensitivity, commitment and generosity. I do not want to make a list of Oriol’s virtues or interpretative range because they are public and known. Oriol, as good a clown that he is, can do everything and he does everything better than well. For me, Oriol belongs to the lineage of the truly huge. If he were American, Oriol would have a house full of Oscars and would have already surpassed Meryl Streep. I like to troll him by saying that he is our Joaquin Phoenix, without all the bad stuff.

We both knew from the beginning that there was only one possible way to make this series: with an open grave and without a net. And so we are constituted: a pair of tightrope walkers, supporting each other, balancing each other at every step, leaning on each other over the precipice so as not to fall. We knew that if we collapsed, we did it together and that if we flew too. 

It has been beautiful to cross thousands of peaks and valleys with Oriol and to see him work and be by his side and observe him and accompany him and talk to him and hug him. It has been and is one of the great honors of my life. It sounds hyperbolic, but it is not.

Often, people who have seen the series ask us how we did it. I need to develop a thesis that makes us both seem very intelligent, educated and talented, but the truth is that I don’t know. We have done it. It was many months, many conversations, countless hours together. He came into my life and I into his and we fell in love creatively speaking. I know that we have worked tirelessly and that it has been a symbiosis full of love, respect, support and care. But I don’t really know how we did it. It has been intuition and brotherhood and tenacity and humility. And I know that what Oriol does in the series seems to me to be within the reach of very, very few people. That every second with him has been a learning experience and that he has made me a much better director than I am. That I would kill to keep riding with him until we are both very old and our teeth have fallen out. That Oriol Pla is the series and the series is Oriol.

And that he entered my life as the protagonist of my series and now he is still in it as one of the people I love most in the world.

I, Addict is streaming exclusively on Disney+ from Wednesday 4 June.