Exclusive: The renaissance of Adriana Fonseca

Because I’m in a mature moment where I see things from another perspective and I think it is important that women who may be going through something similar are inspired by my story. Also, because the world has changed: after the #metoo movement, borders have been opened in conversations that would have been impossible before.

I started working at a very young age, fifteen, and I always made bad choices when it came to falling in love. I had very low self-esteem and I never really went to therapy as a child to fight it. The men that offered me jobs always wanted something more from me, so you grow up with values, but when facing the world it is very difficult to set limits.

In my house, the subject of relationships, love, was always a taboo, so I didn‘t know anything about life. I was very romantic and the first boyfriend I had as a child broke my heart. Of course, my first great love was a bad boy, because the things your parents wanted for you, I did not like that ... He was much older than me and I loved him deeply, but he wanted everything and I was just a child and I left him. A week later he started hanging out with someone else and he brought me down. That marked me forever.

Since I started to do well in Veracruz, I went to Mexico and that’s where the harassment was tremendous. I started modeling where I got acting jobs. I was so innocent and I trusted people blindly. I remember one of the first castings I attended very well. I entered a house and a guy in a robe came out and closed the door behind me. I was barely 17 years old. I was in shock without understanding anything, the guy tried something and I ran through the huge house. The man was flying behind me, running around in a robe and with bills in his hand, shouting desperately: “Come on, if I‘m going to pay you” ... Ever since that scare it was very difficult for me to trust anyone.

To date, many think that I have an attitude, because I can be serious at times and very selective about my past experiences. “When we were girls and went out for a walk in Mexico, sometimes I asked my sister to make faces to make herself ugly, so that men wouldn‘t bother us.”

In 2000, I briefly came to LA for work. The men were giving me cards wherever I went, that if Sean Penn‘s brother, that if so-and-so’s agent, but I was already terrified of men, I didn‘t trust anyone.

Professionally and personally. I let myself be manipulated very badly. A combination of low self-esteem and a certain sentimental formation, combined by the not so easy and competitive world of entertainment. I remember a boyfriend telling me: “You know what, yes, you look very pretty, but you are very short. You are very short! Go to Cuba and put a plank on your knee that lifts you up ”. Can you believe I was about to do it? I was also told that I was fat and had to get thinner. Manipulative men who first put you on a pedestal and then make you feel very small so that you are always asking for crumbs of affection and so they do not abandon you.

We Mexicans have the habit of being very frank, of telling things ... But you have to keep secrets, because not everyone loves you well and with that they can manipulate you. Women have to be valued because yes, there are many men who will want to manipulate you, who demand things from the past, who make up stories in their heads and turn it against you.

Yes, I had a relationship in which I hit rock bottom. Victoria Ruffo warned me: “Either you end this or that man is going to kill you.” The two of us worked together at the time in the play ‘Las Harpías’. That person gave me a mesotherapy session to make me look thinner, in which they injected me with something to dissolve the fat from my body which, according to him, I needed. In one place on the tour, I got up at dawn, touched my abdomen and noticed a very hard, large ball and I was very worried. Suddenly they came all over my body and they were no longer small: they were big, like lemons and oranges, it was something horrible. No one knew what was happening except Victoria Ruffo. I cried to her and told her everything, because she was so busy that she couldn‘t even go to the doctor. When I went to the doctor, they could not figure out what I had, and there came a time when the situation was very bad because the balls burst and the infection began to ooze. I had to change my wardrobe. I was fainting and nobody knew. It was very very difficult. Sick and with my already low self-esteem, imagine it with my body full of lumps. It looked like a Christmas tree.

Just then I got a call from LA for a job interview. There I was, already fainting everywhere. After the interview, some friends invited me to dinner and suddenly we met my dear Eugenio López. From car to car I greeted him, it was like an angel that appeared. He invited me to go with him to a party at Nicky Hilton‘s house and from there we went to his house. I knew him well. He was a friend of many years, so I dared to tell him and show him how I was doing. I had the confidence to show him the body and he told me,“You are not going anywhere. You stay here.”

He immediately sent me to his doctor and he took care of all the expenses, because I did not have insurance here in the United States. The doctors could not find out what I had and the bills were piling up and I was dying of grief with him, because the expenses were already huge and they did not figure out the cause of the problem.

A cousin of mine, a dermatologist in Veracruz, told me from the beginning that it was an infection possibly caused by bacteria, which I later learned that I caught through the mesotherapy, and he warned me: they have to drain you. I spoke with Eugenio‘s doctor and they started taking me to the drains. That was horrible, the most painful thing I have ever experienced in my life. I screamed as if I was giving birth, they were such terrible pains that tears still come to my mind if I think about it.

I needed to undergo seven plastic surgeries. I was completely alone in LA. I went to the operating room alone. I left the hospital alone. I was too sad to tell people, even my parents. It was very very hard.

A movie came out in Peru the day after one of the surgeries and because of my desire not to tarnish my career, I flew there in pain. When they saw my body covered in balls and scars, they immediately took me out of the movie. It was horrible. They removed the lesions and they kept growing back. I came back and after the seventh surgery, they had a miracle with the bacteria. I was close to dying: the last doctor who saw me told me. He did a total excavation on me and left me with such huge holes that I had to fill them with gauze so they wouldn‘t show up.

Definitely. Eugenio was divine and always on the lookout and he was the one who took the reins when I no longer had the head to think about anything, other than enduring emotional and physical pain. I know that he is a person who has not only helped me, he has helped many other people from anonymity. Nobody had behaved like this to me in such a disinterested way. I will never forget him and I almost owe him my life. He saved my life. Whenever I see him I tell him so..

I never saw him again.

Of course. It made me mature a lot. When the nightmare ended, it was another me. I immediately got back to work and asking God to give me another chance to live because I felt like I had so much left to do.

One of the most important things is that Telemundo called me there to make the most important novela I have done in my life, ‘Corazón Valiente’. We signed the contract and when they gave me the script, I saw that there were many scenes that were in bathing suits and/or showing skin and I still had scars all over the place. The most curious thing is that nobody ever noticed: I got up three hours before every morning to put makeup on my body and cover all the marks. It had to be perfect and oddly enough, nobody noticed and I succeeded. The strength of the human being is incredible and if your motivation is strong, you fight like crazy and you can achieve nearly impossible things.

Dealing with my self-esteem then was very difficult because, despite the scars, I had to be fine. After that I underwent many treatments to remove them and now I feel better than ever but, for a long time I felt terribly insecure about my body. I did not dare go out with anyone, until I met my husband. When I met Iker, my scars were super marked. I told him and he replied: “I don‘t care about your scars. They are part of you.” That was a win for my heart and gave him a very important place in my life. I trusted someone again for the first time.

It was a process. I went to therapy to work on my self-esteem and, although I have always considered myself a spiritual person, I began to delve deeper into it. I learned about other religions, I studied metaphysics. All of this fascinates me and has been a wonderful tool for me. life. And another thing that I learned at a high price: beware of beauty treatments. If you‘re going to do something to yourself, you can’t go with just anyone and the less invasive everything is, the better, because you truly risk your life.

That‘s how it is. Hollywood is not easy for anyone. They told me about some novels, but I turned down other roles so as not to be distracted from my things in Los Angeles. But this time with Televisa everything was perfectly timed, because everything here was delayed due to the pandemic. They invited me to do a special role that has given me time to do other things, since the protagonists of the novelas are very time consuming. So I wanted to come back with something like that and Nicandro Díaz gave me this golden opportunity for which I am enormously grateful. My character is very strong because it affects the rest of the story and is forever part of the life of the protagonist, David Zepeda.

A luxury that the famous law of attraction has given me. I‘m sure I drew him into my life. I met David at the premiere of ‘La Doña’. I approached and greeted him, something that I don’t usually do out of shyness, but because I really admire him a lot and I thought when I saw him: “How much I would like to work with him one day!” I have always admired how talented he has led his career. So I went over to say hello and we took a selfie. When they told me that he was my partner in the novel, I thought wow, look how the law of attraction worked! What‘s more, I have it on the wall on my cardboard of dreams: a project with Televisa or Univisión in Mexico.

They can‘t be said!” she exclaims, laughing. “If not, they are not met.”

As I imagined. He is a great actor, a very generous partner, very humble, very simple, very professional and with a big heart. He has very nice energy and he treats people very well on set.

Her name is Lucía, an empowered woman with strong values, who loves her family. They are her everything. She meets Chente and they fall in love. They have a beautiful relationship. They are poor but in spite of everything they are very happy, and I won’t tell you much more so that you can see it for yourself in the novela.

I think that the term empowerment is so fashionable now and is of the human being, not of the man and the woman. In the case of women, it is having the power in their hands to be whoever they want to be, the power to make the right decisions, without the need for this to be confused with being very aggressive at work, for example. An empowered woman can decide whether she wants to go out to work or stay home to take care of her children, which is a very decent job. An empowered woman is a woman with values who knows how to communicate with others and is the owner of her world.

The values that I think are important in any woman. First of all, love. To love oneself in order to love others like that. Faced with any difficult situation, women can do things with love; be generous, with others and with themselves; listen, we are in a world in which everyone wants to tell their story, but few people have the ear to listen ... and loyalty, sincerity, fidelity ... All that to me, personally, makes me feel strong and powerful. I believe a lot in karma and in not hurting others. I feel like everything comes back to you.

Sure, I have many. I am very desperate, I want things fast. I am not very patient. I have my character. I take too much, but there comes a time that I explode, so I have had to learn to set limits in time because if I cannot explode. It is very ugly and that is not good.

The family. I pray for them every day. Since I was a child I always wanted to give everything for my family, but I always thought that it was them first and then me. I already learned that first God, then one and then those around you. If you don‘t check yourself, if you don’t take care of yourself, you can‘t be 100% for others. As it happens on airplanes: first you put on the mask and then on your child. It sounds selfish but it is not: it is necessary to be able to help others.

Everything. I was born into a very Catholic family; my grandmother gave communion for more than 50 years in Veracruz. I am a very strong believer in the Virgin of Guadalupe. I‘m not that religious. I don’t go to mass every Sunday, but my faith is very important in life. I love rosaries, but I also love Buddhism, kabbalah, yoga, metaphysics in all its versions. I study a lot on my own. I have been doing meditations of various kinds for two years now, including angels, archangels and it has really changed my life.

It is quite an adventure, marriage is not easy and whoever says otherwise, lies. From day one it was a challenge, because I met him at a time when I was very hurt from my last relationships, working hard and I didn‘t feel ready for a relationship. Still, he insisted; that, plus his humor, his laid-back character, were many qualities that my previous partners had not had and it captivated me. Maybe I had been dazzled until then by those who were tycoons, powerful people who were very manipulative and very macho. Like I was with people of very high levels who also feel they have the power to treat you in a different way. Iker was a real person, who worked in production, a good boy who achieved everything with his work, day after day, and suddenly he asked me if I wanted to be his girlfriend, something that no one did and I loved it. We started dating. He took the time to woo me. He came to see me in Miami. He left everything in Mexico, he had a very good position and he left everything to come to live with me in the United States and he moved to start from scratch with me.

There things got a little more difficult: between the fact that he abandoned everything for me and I had never lived with anyone. After we got married alone, it made me sad, it was not how I had dreamed it, without my family next to me. Not so much that I missed the big wedding, I got married so much in novels that a wedding in style was not a priority, but alone, it was a bit weird. Then we wanted to do it for the church, but the years went by and in the end we have not done it.

After we got married, we got pregnant and we lost the baby. All of this brought us closer and closer together. After we moved to Los Angeles, something we had dreamed of all along for our careers. We love L.A. Arriving here was also quite an adventure, both of us very naive, very alone, we thought it would be much easier. Somehow, although not having our families close was sad and that loneliness united us more as a couple, because you only have each other. The arrival of our dog, Frida, changed our lives: she came to bring light to our relationship, to distract us, became our baby, an eternal baby because it is almost seven years old hahaha.

I do not rule it out, indeed. I left some frozen eggs, but I really do believe this is from God. If it has to be given, it will be given; I trust science, but in the end God has the last word. If God gives it to me, then super; If I don‘t get it, that’s fine. I was a person who always repeated since I was a child that I wanted to have children. I wanted it from a very young age, it seems to me that my soul already knew that it would not be so easy, but with the passage of time, the truth is that I am very happy even though they haven‘t arrived. I do bring a little soul into the world, then let it be for a better world and to add, not just because, the world is not easy.

Yes. The other day I was doing a scene with my supposed little son and reporters sometimes ask you very cruel questions: “Now that you have a son in the novela, has your maternal instinct been awakened?”. I was in shock. People do not know what is happening behind the cameras and those questions point-blank you stay like wow ... I laughed and said: “hey, I‘m not going to shoot myself if I don’t have a son. This is a path and we are going to see what happens.”

Because they‘re going to love it! It is a novela filled with a lot of love, of a lot of family and now in the pandemic it was what we all long for the most, having our loved ones close, being with those you love. In the novela something very strong happens and you learn how you can channel tragedies and to achieve through hardship, there is a happy ending. Another point that I like a lot is how it describes the social classes of Mexico and represents how many times the people with the most money are the most unhappy, while those who have less material goods love each other a lot and can lead more fulfilling lives; that money is important, no doubt, but it has nothing to do with happiness.

He‘s not jealous, trust me. The promise was made from day one that he was not going to give importance to seeing me with other men, but a week after I was in Mexico filming, a large bouquet of beautiful flowers arrived from him. Something that had not happened for a long time ... And he asked me if I had something to do with that, hahaha - she jokes. Iker is the love of my life. He is a very self-confident person who has not made drama, like other relationships that I had, which made everything very, very complicated.