Ana María Orozco revela el lado oscuro de 'Yo soy Betty, la fea'

When Ana María Orozco landed the role of Beatriz Pinzón in "Yo soy Betty, la fea," she thought she understood what she was signing up for. She had prepared. She had a vision for the character—even fashioned makeshift braces from aluminum foil to complete the look of the "ugly" Betty that would transform into a beautiful woman by the show's end. But the casting process itself had already warned her that this role would not be straightforward. The auditions were split into two parts: one for the homely version, one for the glamorous transformation. Casting directors doubted whether audiences would accept an unattractive protagonist. Other actresses came in for the beautiful scenes, women Orozco remembers as divine. She had to prove the concept could work. She did. But what came next—the actual making of the show—would extract a price she could not have anticipated.

When production began in 1999, the Colombian telenovela became a phenomenon almost immediately. Written by Fernando Gaitán and broadcast by RCN Television, the show found an audience that grew larger by the week. Eventually it would reach Netflix, where it became one of the platform's most-watched programs before being removed. The cast—Orozco, Jorge Enrique Abello, Mario Duarte, and others—became household names. The prestige was real. The recognition was intoxicating. But Orozco could barely feel it.

For twenty-two months, she worked eighteen-hour days. Saturdays. Holidays. The show's popularity exploded while she was still on set, still grinding through scenes, still exhausted. "We were filming a lot, and suddenly this boom starts because they're showing it outside and the madness begins, but we're stuck filming," she recalled in an interview for the program Bravissimo. "We started to feel it. We were incredibly tired. It was a year and ten months, and in the last months we were almost on air and had to film whenever possible. Rest was minimal. I wasn't sleeping well." The final months were the worst—the show was airing while they were still shooting, which meant the pressure to deliver new episodes collided with the physical impossibility of sustaining the pace.

The exhaustion was not merely physical. Orozco found herself unable to meet the demands placed on her outside the studio. She couldn't leave her house without being recognized, without being approached, without the weight of the show's success pressing down on her. She was too tired to enjoy it. She was too stressed to manage it. "Unfortunately, everything that happened outside I didn't receive well because I was working, stressed, and dead from exhaustion," she said. "There were demands I couldn't fulfill. I wore myself out from that, and it was very difficult not being able to go out into the street." The show had made her famous, but fame had made her a prisoner.

The financial compensation added insult to injury. Orozco earned approximately 444,000 Colombian pesos per month—the equivalent of two minimum salaries at the time, roughly one hundred dollars. Later, her pay increased to one million pesos, or about two hundred thirty dollars. This was for a role that would define her career, that would make the channel wealthy, that would be watched by millions. "If I tell you how much I earned, you'll die laughing," she told the magazine Caras in 2001. "The channel is the one that got rich. People think that because you're on TV you're a millionaire. Even if you earn a lot of money, it's hard to enjoy it because they kidnap you." The word "kidnap" was not metaphorical. It described the totality of her experience.

Years later, Orozco would also address the show's treatment of homophobia and machismo. The telenovela, made in 1999, contained language and attitudes that reflected the society of that moment—casual homophobic remarks, casual sexism woven into dialogue and plot. "The novela twenty years ago could have homophobic and macho comments, it reflected what was happening in society and still happens," she explained to El País. "But I feel this production made those situations visible, with the language of that moment. Of course, today it would be under the scrutiny of criticism." She was not defending the content so much as contextualizing it—acknowledging that the show, for all its flaws, had at least brought these attitudes into the light.

What Orozco's account reveals is the gap between a show's cultural impact and the human cost of making it. "Yo soy Betty, la fea" became a global phenomenon, spawning adaptations in multiple countries, finding new life on streaming platforms, cementing itself in television history. But for its lead actress, the experience was one of deprivation—of sleep, of freedom, of the ability to inhabit her own success. She had given everything to the role. The role, and the system that produced it, had taken everything in return.