Irene Azuela: Exorcising Mama Elena to keep living after 'Like Water for Chocolate 2' - INTERVIEW

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Some characters are shed with the costume, while others remain attached to the body, like Tita's thick, traditional caramel in Like Water for Chocolate. For Irene Azuela, saying goodbye to Mama Elena wasn't just the end of a day's filming, but the urgent need for an emotional exorcism.

"I needed to get out, put on a bikini, ride a motorcycle, go skydiving—something to completely distance myself from the bitterness this character experiences in her final days," the actress who portrays the most feared matriarch in Mexican literature told me. The final scene didn't bring immediate relief. Because, as she has done throughout the iconic HBO series , Elena de la Garza doesn't go down without a fight.

In the second season of Like Water for Chocolate , whose first episode premiered on Sunday, February 15, Azuela once again inhabits a woman who embodies inherited violence, power wielded through fear, and an emotional rigidity that spans generations. Her Mamá Elena is not a one-dimensional monster, not even at the end. She is, as Azuela herself describes her, a woman without the tools, forged by extreme circumstances. "Life doesn't give her the means, nor does she have the tools to realize that perhaps her ways weren't the most loving," she explains. At the head of a hacienda, alone, responsible for workers and three daughters in a brutal context for women, Mamá Elena built a shell to survive. The cost was enormous.

The series, inspired by Laura Esquivel's novel, delves into the story's central wound. The unequal treatment of the sisters is not a narrative whim, but rather a reflection of trauma. Azuela puts it bluntly. "The rejection of Tita stems from her being the product of something imposed upon her, while Gertrudis is born of love and truth. Rosaura, on the other hand, inherits the tradition and reproduces it without question," she explains.

She can't break the pattern, and that's because "it takes generations to break with those dynamics that don't work and that hurt us so much," the actress summarizes.

Season 2 expands that universe. The story progresses through time and the emotional complexity of its characters, with an ensemble cast once again carrying the weight of melodrama, magical realism, and social commentary. The narrative no longer unfolds solely in the intimacy of the kitchen or through the repression of desire, but also in the consequences of decisions that seemed unchangeable. The figure of Mama Elena, even in her decline, continues to dictate the rhythm of the house and the lives that try to escape her shadow.

In her final days as Mama Elena, Irene Azuela experienced her bed not as a place of rest but as an emotional battleground. "I didn't want to get into that bed anymore," she confesses, recalling days when the realism of the filming bordered on unbearable.

"The prop people would say: 'Put in urine, put in vomit, put in cyanide...' and I'd ask for more dark circles under the eyes, more exhaustion," she recounts, describing how the character's body gradually faded while her hardness remained intact. The bed thus became the ultimate symbol of a woman trapped in her own bitterness, a place from which Azuela felt an urgent need to extricate herself. "How am I going to get out of Mama Elena?" she wondered then, aware that it wasn't enough to simply get out of bed; she had to break with everything that bed represented: control, illness, resentment, and a life lived without tenderness.

For Azuela, playing Mamá Elena was also an uncomfortable mirror. "I'm left with the love for my daughters. I was so proud watching them work," she confesses, emphasizing what the character could never verbalize, but probably carried within her. There's a paradox the actress embraces. Azul Guaita is Tita, Ana Valeria Becerril is Rosaura, and
Andrea Chaparro is Gertrudis.

On set, her presence commanded silence, as she chose to adopt the method acting style, maintaining a coldness reminiscent of Mama Elena. "I would love for that to continue in my experience as an actress," she says with a laugh, aware of the respect her work inspires, without needing to replicate the character's harshness.

The end of filming didn't bring any grand rituals. There was no immediate trip or leap of faith. "I didn't do anything. I returned to myself. I put on makeup, held my daughter, and said: I am powerful and young, and I have a future ahead of me," she recounts. It's a phrase that serves as both closure and a declaration of principles. Mama Elena belongs to another century, to a system that punished women with fewer options. Irene Azuela returns to the 21st century, certain that telling these stories remains necessary.

Perhaps he'll perk up when the final episode airs.

The second season of Like Water for Chocolate doesn't seek to redeem Mama Elena, but rather to understand her. And in that nuance, in that discomfort that can't be resolved with easy answers or happy endings, lies much of its strength.