‘ELITE’ is one of those shows that greatly exaggerates its subject matter, presenting high school students as murderous, deceitful, drug-peddling, alcohol-guzzling, people with very sad personal lives. The beauty of ‘Elite,’ however, is how it convinces the audience to lose sight of the reality of the subject. It convinces us to remove ourselves from reality and insert ourselves into a narrative where students seem to spend way more time partying than they do going to school, where everyone is extremely beautiful, where wrath and envy and lust are the dominant emotions. It is truly a miracle, the way the writers, directors, and actors come together and manage to keep us glued to our screens, episode after episode, as we tunnel headfirst through a story that only marginally represents something the way that thing exists in real life. But perhaps, by doing this, ‘Elite’ is serving its purpose. After all, we do go to Netflix and the movies and refer to books and other sources of art to indulge in fantasy, so we can escape the constraints and the difficulties of the real world.

Having watched the second season of this particular Spanish-language TV show, I have once again come away with the impression that the cast is one of the best things about it and that the cast is one of the reasons why it is so successful. Mexican superstar, Danna Paola, who plays spoilt, rich-girl, Lucrecia, stands out in a remarkably strong performance of a remarkably strong character. Alvaro Rico, as Polo, a bisexual student hiding a dark secret is also quite impressive, as is Mina El Hammani who essays the role of Nadia, a poor, repressed, Muslim student. One of the standouts among the new additions this season is Georgina Amoros who turns in a mind-bogglingly good performance as Cayetana, a poor student who is also domestic worker, but masquerades as the wealthy women she works for. As the season went along, with the students still trying to make it through the events that came about from the murder that closed the previous season, it quickly became clear to me once more that ‘Elite’ has one of the strongest casts in any international show right now. These actors are really talented, and, for me, none of them more so than 19-year-old, Ester Exposito, who plays my favourite character, Carla.

Carla’s complexity is my favourite thing about her. Is she a manipulative vixen who uses sex and deceit to control the men around her or is she a young girl who sees no other way around all of the various strong, villainous figures that she surrounds herself with? No one really knows. To this day, I am still uncertain as to whether Carla is a good person or not. This ambiguity with regards to who she is as a person, beneath the façade, is one of the things that make her quite comparable to Shakespeare’s Lady Macbeth, whom we never really get to figure out as well – is she a power-hungry tyrant or just a woman trying to survive in the world? Carla’s ability to convey an angel-like sweetness, her beauty, her charm, her soft voice, all contribute to her innocent persona, but her actions – like arranging a threesome with herself, Polo, and Christian, or helping a murderer to hide a murder weapon – can be very contrary to everything that is revealed on the outside.

In season two, after the audience has been led to believe that we know who Carla is, she flips the switch once more and invites us to see a softer, more delicate side of her personality – as evidenced in her interaction with Samuel and the fact that she worries him about to the extent that she confesses her knowledge of the murder that took place in season one. It is quite a change from the Carla that we knew, or thought we knew – and yet, even this other dimension to her personality is still not enough to know her at all. She is the kind of character that is always one step ahead of every other character and the audience as well. This unknowability coupled with her beauty, her fire, and her keen, intelligent mind that often inclines towards the darker side of human nature makes her the perfect incarnation of Lady Macbeth. If Lady Macbeth was a high-school girl who was born into wealth and had an active social life in the 21st Century, then she would be Carla.

A lot of the credit for the creation of this character must go to Ester Exposito, who as the actress playing the role, is responsible for bringing this character to life. It is hard to believe that she is only nineteen years old. Not only does she manage to imbue Carla with vitality and deviousness that surpasses the character’s youth, but she also manages to make the character likeable and relatable and ensures that the audience conjures up some amount of empathy for Carla – which is no easy task considering Carla’s difficult personality and the numerous morally incorrect things that the character does. Exposito also perfectly straddles the fine line that renders us incapable of ever knowing who Carla is or what her end-goals and true motivations are. She manages us to reel us in enough so that we like, relate to, and appreciate the character, without ever really knowing what the character’s next move will be – and being able to do all of that with the role at nineteen years old, to me, is talent. It is taking the character as she is on the script and imbuing her with such life and vitality that when she tells a lie, you believe her anyway, despite knowing that you shouldn’t – and in much the same way that we continue to be glued to the show itself even though it is not a true depiction of the real world of high schoolers, so too are we glued to Exposito’s depiction of Carla, knowing that very little of what this character says is true.