Fabián Mazzei: the actor who reemerges on stage after tragedy, family resilience, and eighteen years of love

After nearly six years away from the stage, Fabián Mazzei returns with the determination of someone who has learned that life can change in an instant. The actor who marked generations of viewers with his role in Champions presents himself at the Multiescena with The 39 Steps, a theatrical adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock’s iconic film. In this conversation, he reveals how an accident almost cost him everything, how he rebuilt his life alongside Araceli González, and reflects on the Argentine entertainment industry in times of crisis.

A theatrical resurrection after the fall

When Mazzei stepped back onto a stage for rehearsals of The 39 Steps, he felt the weight of the years away. “The first day I sweated a lot,” he confesses. Thirteen years ago, he had played the same narrator character in a previous production when this Hitchcock-based play came to Buenos Aires. Now he returns, and although the role hasn’t changed, he has: he carries with him the trauma of a fall that kept him in rehabilitation for a full year.

In 2022, while trying to avoid an imminent storm, Mazzei climbed onto his roof to clean the leaves. His wife advised him not to do it. Confident after fifteen years of doing that task, he ignored her. With water bags in his hands, he lost his balance descending the stairs. He fell from three meters high. The extraordinary part was what happened during the fall: he turned his body in the air to avoid landing on his back, cushioning the impact with his heel. “I practically broke my heel,” he recounts, “they put three screws in it. I went through a wheelchair, crutches, and a year of rehab. It was a short fall, honestly, because it could have been much worse.”

The recovery was not only physical. The work material that arrived during those months offered him opportunities to work in interior cities —Córdoba, Mar del Plata— but he didn’t want to leave Buenos Aires. The reason was understandable: he had just launched his own cosmetics brand with Araceli.

From factory work to entrepreneurship: a life of ventures

Entrepreneurial spirit is nothing new to Mazzei. His childhood was marked by working alongside his father in a sanitary plumbing factory. When he finished high school, his parents believed he would study Physical Education. In reality, he wanted to be an actor. “I deliberately failed the exam,” he admits with a smile. His father accepted the decision with one condition: work from six in the morning at the factory, and study theater at night.

Cinema was his inspiration. Watching movies with his mother while his father slept —Luis Sandrini, Pepe Arias, The Turbid Waters— he discovered the magic of film. It was The Godfather that sealed his destiny: “It blew my mind and that’s when I decided.” In high school, he starred in The Sound of Music. One day he heard Agustín Alesso in an interview explaining that he gave acting courses, and he signed up without hesitation. Alesso gave him his first opportunity in Delirious Leticia, working alongside China Zorrilla, Maurice Jouvet, and Nelly Bertrand.

Television made him famous. He appeared on popular shows like Amigovios and Like Hot Bread, mainly on Channel 13. It was when he joined Polka for Gasoleros that he began to establish himself, but the real breakthrough came with Champions. The character of Garmendia took him to a turning point: “People stopped calling me by the character’s name and learned my name. That’s when I really felt like an actor.” At that time, along with Osvaldo Laport, they starred in situations that froze the Argentine audience. Women preferred Guevara, the “scoundrel” played by Laport, while men shouted in supermarkets: “Kill him!”

That was a golden era for national fiction, when actors like Carlos González and colleagues of his generation had a permanent presence on screen. But Argentine fiction collapsed, and Mazzei saw it coming. “We weren’t prepared for this moment technically, as actors, or in production. Other countries keep making fiction. In Mexico, unions don’t exist; here they do, and sometimes they’re very structured. I filmed in Uruguay and they don’t charge taxes, they let you film with a simple permit. There are many things that don’t exist here. I think everyone protected their own turf and we weren’t ready for what was coming.”

The European journey and the return home

At one point in his life, Mazzei was about to “plant his flag” in Spain. He was in a relationship, work was flowing, life seemed to unfold in Iberian lands. But when the relationship ended, he discovered an uncomfortable truth: “Friends aren’t really yours but hers, and the people you know are people you’ve known for a short time. Argentina is my country. My genes pull me back, despite all the chaos we have.”

With the money saved abroad, he opened a beauty salon, a hairdresser, a distributor. His entrepreneurial personality —what he calls being a “go-getter”— never disappeared. “I’ve always been like that,” he reflects. That ability to reinvent himself, to seek opportunities in every crisis, is perhaps the trait that best defines him.

Araceli: eighteen years, a cosmetics line, and the complexity of mixing love and business

Mazzei and Araceli González have been together for eighteen years. They married after many years of cohabitation —Tomás Kirzner, Araceli’s son, asked them to because he was “tired of saying he was my mom’s boyfriend”—. During that time, they built a cosmetics brand that went from an online store to a showroom, and now they have a store at Unicenter. Mazzei handles the numbers and business logistics.

“Is it complicated that your wife is your partner?” we asked. His honest answer: “It’s not good. That’s the truth.” The constant desire to go home and switch from entrepreneurs to a couple again is there. “Sometimes I want to get home so she can turn into ‘Araceli-home’ and I into ‘Fabián-home.’ Because we have different opinions, we need to find a balance, and that can be exhausting. With another partner, you say ‘we’ll talk tomorrow,’ but with Ara, we go home together.”

What’s extraordinary is how they’ve maintained their relationship. He’s known Florencia Torrente since she was very young —though he lived less time with her after she moved away— but with Tomás, the cohabitation was deeper: “Since he was 8. We lived together a lot, until a couple of years ago when he moved out alone.” When both children left, the house was silent. “The empty nest syndrome was real, especially with Toto. I had a daily bond, and now we talk on the phone almost every day, but we don’t see each other always. It was a little hard to adjust as a couple because there was too much peace, and we started arguing more,” he jokes.

The secret to eighteen years together, according to Mazzei, is paradoxical: “We fight,” he says with a smile. “But we never sleep apart. Well, once I slept at one end of the house and she at the other. And the next day, we acted like nothing happened.” He is the peacemaker of the couple. When Araceli faces legal issues with Adrián Suar —which periodically resurface in the media— Mazzei tries not to get involved, but when the attacks are very unfair, he loses patience. “I think people are mean because there’s no other way to say it. That’s when I put on my gloves and jump in. At this point, I’m not afraid of anyone. I know that, in the end, the truth will prevail.”

She came into his life during a “painful process,” he recalls. But he discovered something fundamental: “Once you find support, you’re the one who gets up.” Together, they also faced another pain: the spontaneous miscarriage of a hoped-for pregnancy. “Ara lost a pregnancy, and it was a big pain. Of course, it’s all over now, but at the time it was distressing. We didn’t expect that news, and it happened, and we got excited. And it couldn’t be.”

The sixties and the retrospective view

He just turned sixty. “The number kind of scares me,” he admits, “it’s strong. But I feel good and look good.” He hasn’t undergone aesthetic procedures. His only routine is applying cream, a habit he picked up working in Spain: “I was sweet, used good products, and I kept the habit.” His compass is Tomás. Watching him grow and now become an adult, Mazzei becomes aware of his own maturity.

He would have liked to have children of his own, but life decided otherwise. What he does have is the satisfaction of having built a career, of returning to the stage with The 39 Steps, of getting up from a three-meter fall. Of turning crises into businesses. Of maintaining a relationship with a woman for eighteen years, through good and bad times, sharing business and dreams.

On the stages of Multiescena, throughout the summer, he performs the opening monologue of The 39 Steps from Thursday to Sunday. His hands no longer sweat like that first time. The actor has returned.