José Luis Gil suffered a stroke in 2021. The actor coincided in Here There Is No One Live and La que se cerca with Luis Merlo, who could not help but get emotional when talking about his partner’s state of health.
“It is a very painful topic because he is a colleague of many years, we have been working together for 22 years. I am in contact with the family and through a friend of mine and his, we are permanently interested and involved in the subject,” declared the actor, that brought tears to her eyes, during the presentation of the new season of La que se cerca at the FesTVal in Vitoria-Gasteiz.
“The only thing I wish for him is a recovery and for him to be José Luis Gil again because it is wonderful to be Luis and then to be Luis Merlo. Luis Merlo is an invention, I don’t even have that name, my name is Luis María Larrañaga Merlo, Luis Merlo is an invention that has generated my imagination to have a career. José Luis in life is José Luis, and then he is José Luis Gil, the actor who plays. There is an enormous difference between those two things. I know that José Luis needs to go back to to be José Luis Gil and I only wish him to achieve it as soon as possible,” added Merlo, making it clear that his teammate wants to recover to return to work.
Furthermore, the media asked Luis Merlo about his best memory with José Luis Gil. “There are many, there are many. One of them was that, suddenly, the success of Aqui no hay que viva occurred and he suddenly had a visibility that he did not previously have,” he explained.
“They called him to do a theater project and he told me ‘please, do all the talking, because I don’t know, from my new point of view of life, of my situation and of the profession, I don’t know. Please ‘Guide me, tell me what I have to ask for, how much to charge’. His situation in the world of the profession had changed,” the artist recalled.