Juan Teisaire Learns a New Language in the Upcoming Feature Junkie Diaries
For Juan Teisaire, preparing to play Nico in the upcoming feature film Junkie Diaries required learning a language he had never spoken. It was not a literal language. The Argentine actor has already built a bilingual career across Latin American and American television and film. This time, the unfamiliar language was the reality of heroin addiction—a world completely removed from his own life and one he knew could not be approached through imitation alone.
Directed by Dave Morrissey Jr., Junkie Diaries centers on Nico and Ophelia, whose relationship unfolds within the realities of heroin addiction. As their lives become increasingly affected by it, the film examines the consequences of addiction not only for the person using the drug, but also for the people closest to them. The feature is currently in post-production and being prepared for festival submissions. Teisaire, who plays the leading role, describes it as an intimate and uncompromising portrayal of addiction—one that refuses to make its characters easy to judge from a safe distance.
“Nico is a good kid, but he has a complicated relationship with how he wants to be seen,” Teisaire says. “Because of the way he was raised, the lines between being respected, being in control, and having power have become blurred. The film is ultimately about his relationship with Ophelia and the impact he has on her life, so I don’t want to reveal much more than that.”
The distance between Nico’s circumstances and Teisaire’s own became one of the central challenges of the performance. Rather than treating that distance as something to disguise, he made it the starting point of his preparation. He spoke extensively with people who had firsthand experience using heroin, asked detailed questions of Morrissey, and studied how addiction had been portrayed in other films. But preparation also required recognizing where those portrayals could be misleading.
“One of the most important things I learned was that addiction doesn’t always look the way films teach us to expect,” Teisaire explains. “Onscreen, you can often identify the addict immediately. In reality, people struggling with heroin addiction can be incredibly intelligent, gentle, and loving. They may have experienced a difficult period, encountered the wrong influence, or made a decision that gradually took control of their lives. I wanted Nico to remain a person—not become a collection of recognizable symptoms.”
For Teisaire, the challenge was allowing the effects of heroin to remain visible without letting them consume every aspect of the character. “I needed to show what heroin was doing to him without falling into the conventional performance of addiction,” he says. “It couldn’t be the only thing the audience saw. I had to find the parts where that reality met something personal in me, even though our lives are completely different.”
It was not the first time Teisaire had been required to enter a world he could not initially access through familiar language. In American Daydream, a short film that screened at HollyShorts, he worked in an environment where much of the communication happening around him was in languages he did not understand. The experience taught him that listening is not limited to words; meaning could also be found in rhythm, behavior, silence, and the subtle changes that occur between people.
“On American Daydream, almost everyone around me spoke a different language, so part of the work was learning how to exist truthfully in a world I couldn’t access through words,” he says. “Junkie Diaries presented a different version of that challenge. The reality of Nico’s life couldn’t be further from my own. His relationship with heroin and his need for control initially felt like a language I didn’t speak. My preparation was really about learning that language—understanding it well enough that I could stop translating and simply live inside his world.”
That process reflects the direction Teisaire’s work has increasingly taken. His career began in Argentina, where he appeared as Willy in the Nickelodeon and Telefe musical series Kally’s Mashup. His work later expanded into American television, feature films, short films, and theater, moving between English- and Spanish-language productions. His American television work includes Investigation Discovery’s Before They Kill Again, in which he portrayed Eddie Seda. His film credits include If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing, an award-winning feature selected for the Bentonville Film Festival, and Governors Island, directed by Rebecca Eskreis, whose producing credits include the Academy Award-nominated short film A Lien. Governors Island premiered at the Academy Award-qualifying Indy Shorts International Film Festival.
Across these projects, Teisaire has resisted defining his work by a particular genre, language, or market. The more consistent thread is his interest in people whose internal contradictions cannot be explained neatly. Rather than asking the audience to excuse Nico, Junkie Diaries attempts something more uncomfortable: to understand him without simplifying the damage he causes. For Teisaire, that required setting aside the familiar image of addiction and listening closely enough to discover the person underneath it.
