Marcos Giles, known to many as “Angelita Torres’ boyfriend,” is finding success in a new chapter. Currently part of the popular streaming program “Nadie dice nada,” Giles’ path to entertainment was unconventional, initially aiming for a career in professional soccer before a series of setbacks and the pandemic altered his course. He’s become a popular figure online, known as “El Mito” for his persona as a storyteller, and hosts his own stream.
Giles revealed he rarely gives interviews, and even questioned bringing his constant companion—a traditional mate gourd—to his recent conversation with journalist María Laura Santillán. “It’s kind of an attachment object,” he explained.
“Like a teddy bear when we’re babies?” Santillán asked.
“It’s my teddy bear,” Giles replied. “I got it because I was traveling a lot on my own, and sometimes just wandering around. I’d take the mate and proceed for a walk. It was also a way to meet people. I was in Rome, for example, and an Argentinian would spot the mate, say hello, and that would give me a chance to approach them and start a conversation.”
“In my last interview, I had a panic attack, so you’ve been warned if I start shaking,” Giles joked, acknowledging his shyness.
“Because you’re highly shy?” Santillán inquired.
“I am shy, yes. I don’t give interviews, I don’t like them, it embarrasses me. I had a panic attack during the last one, so you’ve been warned if I start shaking,” he reiterated.
“What do you do when you have a panic attack?”
“It was more of an anxiety attack.”
“You have so many thoughts at once that you don’t recognize them and the CPU crashes,” he described the feeling.
Before his interview, Giles was known online for his humor. However, his initial ambition was a career in soccer. “I played two games,” he said.
“You played in Claypole and Yupanqui…” Santillán prompted.
“I didn’t even make it to debut in Yupanqui. But two games count for me.”
“Did you go play in New Zealand?”
“Yes. And Italy…”
“Everything was very accidental, wasn’t it?” Santillán asked.
“Yes, it was a bit forced, a bit far-fetched because I was already 21 when I went to Claypole. As a kid, I had asthma and couldn’t play soccer, I loved it, but I couldn’t. When my asthma cleared up, I said: I’m going to do everything possible whereas I study to play everything I couldn’t play as a kid. The opportunity came up to go to Claypole, I lived in La Plata, Claypole was far away and it was the lowest league. I started completely green, imagine, without a youth system, an amateur club in the first division. On top of that, the club was being run by barras bravas [violent soccer fan groups], we were in a bad situation, every six or seven training sessions there was intimidation. Once they smashed up our cars. I like to think that sometimes you have to pursue something you desire that seems impossible. Pursue it, challenge yourself, set the goal of going for it, even if today it seems like you can’t achieve it, I like to transform myself along the way. That happened with ‘Nadie dice nada,’ that happened with the stream, that happened with soccer, with traveling. In everything I try to say: it’s a challenge, I’m going for it, the person who arrives there or close to the goal will be different from the one who started.”
He went to New Zealand to work, save money, get a passport, and try to play in Italy. He spent three months there during the summer. “Three months that were very hard, I was a kid from the middle class, my dad was a teacher, but I always slept in a bed and had a car to go to training.”
“And where did you sleep?” Santillán asked.
“I arrived with little money and the place was very full, it’s an island for vacations where many people go. Two days later, I was sleeping in a tent on the floor of a patio. I didn’t speak the language and didn’t have a work visa, the jobs were black market gigs. I had never painted before, they were things I didn’t know how to do. Now I think about it and I say, why did I go? I was really useless, people could see my intention to learn and were a little more patient with me.”
“It was also a bit like that in Claypole, and in New Zealand, the quarantine caught up with you, the second problem.”
“Yes, the pandemic. I had a flight on March 17th, and I was already illegally in the country. On the 15th, quarantine started and I had to make a decision: go back to my mom’s house and spend the pandemic there, or see what happened. Just then, my friends had moved to a nice house, I wasn’t in a tent anymore and we had bought a PlayStation, so I stayed.”
“Sea and beach.”
“I had the sea, it was a beach and the pandemic there didn’t last long. New Zealand is two islands and I lived on an island within those two islands, so the virus didn’t enter.”
“You had a good time. The second problem worked in your favor. When you went to Italy to play soccer, how old were you?”
“I was 22 when the pandemic started and I went to Italy at 25, wanting to get rid of that thorn in my side. To prove I could make a living at it.”
“You got injured there, bad luck.”
“I can see it as bad luck. I’ll say what I’m going to say, but I feel like I generated it myself. You’ll see many things in life that happen through the subconscious. You have a desire that you don’t dare to express or that you’re not yet aware of, and the subconscious knows it. The body, which is wiser, makes decisions to get you closer to that.”
“In this case, the desire was to return to Argentina?”
“Of course, I had been away for three years. I had achieved what I wanted, I had arrived in Italy, I was getting my citizenship and a club had called me offering me a salary and housing, it was a good situation. And when they told me, ‘we want you, you have to stay until April next year’… It was November, I had to spend the whole winter in a town of 3,000 people. So many things had happened that the goal no longer filled me, I wanted to go home, see my family. I had wanted to do content since New Zealand.”
“You had to get injured to start working in social media.”
“One hundred percent. The night before I got injured, I said, ‘I don’t want to stay until April, I want to leave.’ But I was afraid to say it, they had made an effort to bring me, everyone in town was happy, they didn’t have another forward. How am I going to tell them I’m not staying? And one of the thoughts at night was that the only way was to get injured, because then it wouldn’t be my responsibility. I even imagined greeting them, leaving on crutches, as if saying ‘I did everything I could.’ The next day I went to training, I had forgotten about it. Then I remembered.
“Did you prepare for it?”
“No, but it was a thought, a solution my head came up with. I even imagined greeting them and leaving on crutches. The next day I went to training and had forgotten about it.”
“You fantasized about getting back into soccer this summer with Riestra. Have you given up on the idea, or do you still fantasize?”
“I recovered, had surgery and a week before returning to Italy, I got injured again. I felt like a part of me had died, that soccer is an excuse not to take responsibility for another side of me, a more sensitive, artistic side, so to speak. The night before my surgery I said, ‘that’s it, maybe I won’t wake up tomorrow.’”
“What do you do for a living? What do you tell immigration officials?”
“What do I put? It’s embarrassing! Influencer makes me uncomfortable, I don’t feel like one. Content creator, that’s what I do. What I like is to entertain people and entertain myself, look for stories, debate.”
“Did you study this, or are you self-taught?”
“No, I’m a donkey, I can’t even use Instagram, the phone. I used to have a friend film my videos, I’d talk for three minutes and he’d edit them. Now a friend has bought CapCut, paid the $8 a year to edit better and he helps me with the clips, I’m still quite archaic.”
“Do you pay your friend?”
“Of course, all my friends are on the books just in case. I have a friend who represents me, my sister too, another edits my videos. I just started asking for support. I uploaded two or three TikToks and a brand reached out. I was embarrassed to tell them ‘this is what I charge’ and I said ‘I’ll pass you to my representative.’ My representative was me by email, Marcos Giles Contracting. Later, when more started coming in, I told a friend to take charge and take a percentage.”
“Who tells you how much to charge?”
“If you accept it, that’s fine. What if you don’t accept it? Well. It can be very little, for a super sandwich. I have a friend who handles that, I assume he gets advice.”
“Do you still go back and forth from La Plata? We’ve talked several days when you were going and coming from La Plata. Do you live with your mom?”
“No, I don’t live in La Plata, nor do I live with my mom. When I started with Luzu, I was living in La Plata, in an apartment I had rented.”
“Not with your mom.”
“Noooo, but I go often, I have a great relationship with my mom. Luzu offered me to be there in January and February and gave me the possibility of being in a hotel, sometimes I stayed and sometimes I went back. Going back and forth every day was very exhausting and I rented an Airbnb temporarily, in a place that didn’t have much personality.”
“Sea and beach.”
“I had the sea, it was a beach and the pandemic there didn’t last long. New Zealand is two islands and I lived on an island within those two islands, so the virus didn’t enter.”
“How do you feel when they say ‘Ángela Torres’ boyfriend’?”
“I understand that. I understand that she has a 20-year career, she has well-known relatives and is very popular. And that I’m known for being with her doesn’t embarrass me, quite the contrary.”
“You answered like a soccer player.”
“I put on the cassette because that’s a topic I know will always cause a stir on social media. So I try not to mess it up.”
“Are you very in love?”
“Uhh. The pause isn’t because I doubt it, the pause is because I don’t know what to answer.”
“Are you thinking ‘what do I say’?”
“Yes, of course. Obviously, I’m very in love. I think it shows, you can see it. Everything that happened to me this year, overcoming fears or barriers, some of that was… Being invited to ‘Nadie dice nada,’ but there were so many people watching, it was a new group I didn’t know. I never went, I felt comfortable, I didn’t like it.
“It was very comfortable. You looked very good.”
“This was before Angelita, from January of last year. Then, one day, the producer told me, ‘you have to come tomorrow,’ and I didn’t want to, of course. I like that what I do is seen and that’s the place where it’s most seen, but at the same time it generated a lot of insecurity. I don’t understand to this day why I said yes, Nico, Santi, Ángela were there, I didn’t know her. From the first joke there was a connection, she understood me, I understood her, we laughed, something very natural happened. And I really liked going, it was the only time. Not the only time, I don’t want to diminish it, but it was the one time I really connected, had a great time with a really nice group, in a place that today is the most watched and most important program, and for me the funniest and the best.”
“It makes you nervous, but it also gives you a lot of security.”
“It made me nervous, but it gave me security, enough to be myself. ‘Come on, you with your insecurities and your fears and your sensitivity. And you don’t have to do the cocky character, which is what I usually do a little to hide that.’ I got nervous because it was real, the stakes were high. I’ve never had that before.”
“She sees beyond the character. It’s hard to see beyond the character, you play the cocky character so well. Was she able to get past those filters quickly?”
“Yes, I don’t know how much she trusted at first, because it took me a while for her to loosen up and believe me. We’ve had conversations, she sees me streaming, then she sees me outside and doesn’t understand.”
“How is it that you’re shy?”
“Sure. What I bring in front of the camera is the character. To make something happen, to entertain, I position myself on the other side, that comes to me easily. And I’m not embarrassed because I don’t feel like I’m putting something of my own in. When I speak from myself, from a more real place and not so performative, it embarrasses me.”
“It’s true that you’re shy.”
“Yes.”
“Talking about your mom doesn’t embarrass you? You said you have a great relationship. I imagine you’re a mama’s boy, maybe that’s my fantasy.”
“Talking about my mom doesn’t embarrass me, it makes me proud. It moves me. She raised my sister and me, obviously with my dad. But in the society we live in, the work of a housewife and mother is done by women and is not paid. We didn’t have much, we didn’t have a lot of resources, we didn’t go on vacation, but she always prioritized making us feel loved, giving us a place. I think what I do, playing at doing something else and feeling comfortable, came because at home I found that anything I did, any joke, any silliness, she would look at me with eyes of tenderness, of love. With the eyes I try to look at myself and to look at the world. All it takes is that. My friends went to the United States and I was annoyed, I didn’t have that opportunity. But it’s worth nothing if it’s not there, if there isn’t that love, feeling loved and feeling important. That’s the nicest thing.”
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