According to her mother, María del Mar Coll said: “She wanted to be a Nintendo game tester.”

PalmWhen she was little, she loved pencil sharpeners so much that she said when she grew up she wanted to be one. "Nintendo and Game Boy game tester." She was terrified of animals—"it's quite frightening"—but that changed when Boira, a little dog, came home at age twelve, transforming her fear into affection. She belongs to the generation of young girls who started wandering around town with a digital camera, taking "photoshoots" and then posting them on Fotolog and Tuenti. There's a strange balance in her daily life: a combination of stage fright and embarrassment with the excitement and joy of telling stories to an audience, whether young or old. We're talking about Maria del Mar Coll (Muro, 1994), actress, screenwriter, presenter, and comedian. She tells us how small her mother, Martina Ferriol, was.

"She's exactly as you see her on TV," she says, but then adds a nuance: "She comes across as confident, and she is, but she's also a bit shy and very forgiving of embarrassment, because she's very demanding of herself." Beyond what you see on television, Martina explains that as a very young child, Maria del Mar was "curious, noisy, and didn't sleep much." She's an only child and grew up between Muro and Can Picafort, surrounded by the same circle of friends. "They were together from kindergarten, three or four of them who are still the same ones today." Years later, they would go for walks together to take photos with a digital camera—"if we could open Fotolog, we'd have a good laugh," says Martina—and together they also discovered their first summer nights at Banana's in Alcúdia.

Maria del Mar would invite her friends over because she was a real homebody: "Besides, she'd put on shows at home: costumes, makeshift stages, musical performances, huts. What she does on TV now, she used to do for us and her friends." She is, because she was, a performer. Her comedic side is innate: her star role was "playing the godmother," dressed in her friends' clothes, who would compete with each other in laughter. In fact, when she did theater in Muro, around the age of nine, she played the role of an old woman: "For a while, the townspeople would recognize her by saying, 'That doll, the old lady from Muro.'" In that pre-adolescence, Maria del Mar especially enjoyed the stage: "She loved to make people laugh, she was a real clown," says Martina.

As an only child, she learned to play on her own until she arrived in Niebla at the age of twelve. At that time, she was accompanied by the music of Shakira, Spice Girls, and Beyoncé, but also by an artist who burst onto the music scene in 2004 and marked the lives of almost all pre-teen girls at that time: María Isabel with her Better dead than plainAt that time, I was also a fan of the series. Rebel Way and looked Friends Influenced by her mother – “she knew the lines by heart from repeating them so much!” says Martina. With her godmother, she watched Concha Velasco’s television programs, and spent hours and hours watching El Club Super3. When she was older, her mother recalls, she became hooked on comedy programs like Buenafuente and Homo Zapping

Seen this way, and considering that some teachers at school praised her writing style, it seems natural that the young woman from Muro is connected to audiovisual media and communication from different angles. But she didn't leave: when it was time to study, she decided to pursue Psychology. She completed three years, but didn't start the fourth: "I saw that wasn't her path," her mother recalls. She enrolled at CEF to study film and screenwriting, and there she began to navigate the audiovisual world. She made some short films and met directors and professionals in the industry: "At that moment she was able to unleash her talent. She was euphoric." And even now: Maria del Mar's euphoria is far from over.