Victoria Guerra: an actress with “experiences” and a solid career

Many of these trips were to Lisbon, and perhaps that's why she became fascinated by the capital from an early age. That's why she decided to move to Lisbon at the age of 15, a very unusual choice for kids that age.

When the time came to choose a field, as she entered 10th grade, something was very clear to Victoria Guerra. "I knew I didn't want to go to Loulé high school, and I remember thinking there was no point in feeling pressured to choose a path at that age. There was also a lot of pressure from the 'doctors,' and despite having a lawyer father, I knew there were fields I didn't want to pursue at all. But there wasn't anything that really appealed to me either."

She visited several schools with her mother, and when they visited the Faro high school, she heard someone say they were going to live in Lisbon. On impulse, she too blurted out: "What if I went to Lisbon?" The expected response would be: "No way." Victoria's mother said: "Let's go!"

He says it helped that his parents were "super cool and crazy," but above all, his English mother's different mentality.

With their sights set on Lisbon, they began looking for schools. He enrolled at EPCI (Professional School of Communication and Image), studying journalism. "The course seemed super interesting, but what captivated me most was the fact that all the students were new, they came from different places, no one knew each other, so we were all on equal footing."

Living alone was out of the question, so they opted for a student dormitory, with a shared room, which would also force her to make friends. "Although I'm not Catholic or baptized, it was a convent school. It welcomed students and also girls in difficult situations. It was a family-like space."

For the first week, her father stayed put, staying elsewhere. On the first day of school, Victoria didn't wake up. "I was used to being woken up at home, and of course I had a panic attack because that's when everything that was happening hit me."

Instead of rushing her to school, her father sat with her on a terrace and they spent the whole morning talking. "That day, I wondered what the hell I was doing with my life, but we weighed the pros and cons, and my father was incredible. Their trust in me helped me a lot, and at the same time, he said, 'Your house will be there, your room will be there, and we will always be there. The moment you don't want this, you can come home without any problem, but since you're here, try it.' It was a turning point."

Then began a three-year journey that would ultimately be incomplete due to an experience called "Farrangos com Açúcar ." For her journalism course, she had to present a weekly news piece, and someone in her group decided to take advantage of a huge casting call for a TVI youth series and interview the people in line.

“It was terrible because the line was endless, there were people sleeping on the street, and parents wanted to hit us every time we approached.”

Thousands of people surrounded the Casa do Artista in Lisbon, and when Victoria and her colleagues walked around the building, they saw an open gate. "It sounds awful, but we went in and ended up being given some bracelets for the casting. It was one of those where you take a photo, say your name, and little else," she recalls.

The adventure didn't go beyond that, but the phone rang a few months later and she was called for another casting call, this time with a script. "I had no experience whatsoever; even in television classes, I couldn't look at the camera. I remember a teacher, journalist Pedro Pinto, yelling at us because we couldn't speak to the camera."

What saved her was a colleague who had already worked on television and helped her prepare. She saw the casting as another new experience, never expecting it to be the beginning of her career. "Looking back, I see it was a series of 'being in the right place at the right time,' but at the time I was too naive to understand what was happening."

She was 17, so her parents had to travel to Lisbon for meetings with the series' production team. She began filming the summer season and, when she was invited to continue, realized it would be impossible to combine filming with her studies. "It was 12 hours of filming a day, Monday through Saturday, and at the time I asked my parents for advice. They encouraged me to accept; I could continue studying later, and I was enjoying this experience that took me a little outside my comfort zone. I froze my enrollment and continued with the series."

With her first paycheck, she went on a spree that was the biggest extravagance for a 17-year-old girl. "I remember going to Colombo [shopping center] and buying everything I could find."

However, she was always careful about her accounts. "I remember writing out the receipts, which were still on paper, and delivering them to the accounting department. My father helped me, of course, but it was a huge relief for my family to become financially independent."

After two and a half years in the convent school dormitory, she rented a house with her fellow cast members from "Morangos com Açúcar ." "The schedule became unworkable because I would often arrive home from filming after 1 a.m. or leave before 7, and the sisters would have to wake up to let me in," she recalls.

The same friend who helped her prepare the script for the casting for "Morangos com Açúcar" (Morangos com Açúcar) entered her into the Elite Model Look modeling competition. Once again, Victoria Guerra said, "Let's try it out." She made it to the finals, but the world of fashion never fascinated her like acting did.

The work flowed on and on. While Victoria Guerra wasn't yet finished with Morangos com Açúcar , she had already received an invitation to star in the evening soap opera, Fascínios . "Moving onto a nighttime soap opera was a kind of transition into the adult world. In that story, Marina Mota and Júlio César played my parents; it was an incredible learning experience. I learned a lot from Marina Mota, and I think that was the first time I truly understood the true scope of this work. The admiration I had for her instilled in me a passion. Alexandra Lencastre and João Perry were also people who helped me; they were very important to me during that period."

Her mother, a huge fan, kept everything about her daughter's career, from magazine clippings to CDs of soap opera scenes. When she returned to England to live—after her husband's death in 2014—she handed over a trunk full of books to her daughter. "She was friends with the lady at the stationery store, so she knew right away when something came out. She really had everything; it's so sweet."