Money Heist: The Real Reason The Robbers Have City Names

Money Heist is one of the most liked shows of Netflix. And the characters of the show have geographic codenames. Although later in the show, their backstories and names were revealed, the Professor assigned city codenames to his team members in the first place. Even officer Raquel Murillo who later joined the heist was also given the city name Lisbon. In this article, we will try to find out the reason why the robbers were assigned city names?

Money Heist is a Spanish heist crime drama series originally named La Casa de Papel (The House of Paper). Alex Pina creates the television series. The series was initially planned to be of two seasons. The original show in Spanish has 15 episodes on Antena 3. The original version aired from 2nd May 2017 to 23rd November 2017. Netflix later streamed the show in 2017. Show creator then re-cut the series into 22 episodes and released the series worldwide from 20th December 2017 to 6th April 2018. Netflix renewed the show with a moderately increased budget for 16 episodes. The third season of the series was eight episodes and released on 19th July 2019. The fourth season came out on 3rd April 2020 with eight episodes. And in July 2020 the team of Money Heists began their production work of the fifth season.

The shooting of the series took place in Madrid, Spain. Few sequences of the show were filmed in Thailand, Italy, and Panama. Money Heist is the story from the perspective of a woman named, Tokyo, played by Ursula Corbero. The show was a great hit and widely accepted and appreciated by audiences and critics. It has won 46th International Emmy Awards. The Italian anti-fascist song “Bella ciao” became a chat-buster which was played multiple times in the show.

La casa de Papel is set in Madrid, a mysterious man known as “Professor”, who recruited eight people and gave them code names after cities to execute a heist in the Royal Mint of Spain. The team captured 67 people for 11 days to print money and escaped with €2.4 billion. The group then hid to save themselves from police and found themselves preparing for the second heist.

The idea of the series is conceived by director Jesus Colmenar and screenwriter Alex Pina during their collaboration for a project in 2008. After finishing their project of the Spanish prison drama named Vis a vis (Locked up). They left the studio of Globomedia and started their own company named Vancouver Media in the year 2016. They planned to keep the series limited as the ratings of their previous show dropped due to the delusion of the story. The team decided the first project will be either comedy or a heist story. The show was initially titled as Los Desahuciados (The Evicted) during the conception phase, and it was developed with combined elements of thriller, surrealism, and action genres. Pina found an advantage for heist movies, as the characters in the series can have multiple sides to break the preconceptions of the audiences. The initial storyline of the show was pretty good, but the extraordinary story beats failed to impress the writers. To make the story up to the mark, writer Javier Gomez Santander tried to go deeper into the thoughts of the character Professor, he also consulted engineers who he could not tell why he asked them that.

The shooting of the series started in January 2017 after five-month pre-production. For financial consideration, the story was split into two parts. Although the code name of the robbers was based on city names, it was assumed to be inspired from 1992 Quentin Tarantino’s heist film titled Reservoir Dogs. The creators shared that to write the first five lines of the show took them months to final, as it was challenging to make Moscow or Professor as narrator. In the end, Tokyo was presented as an unreliable narrator to make the story more fluid.

The casting for the show started in late 2016 and took more than two months to finalize the actors for the respective roles. The Professor’s character was written beautifully as a charismatic yet shy person who could convince the rest of the robbers to follow him and also able to make the viewers sympathetic to the robbers’ actions.

In the cast of the Professor, the producer initially wanted to cast Javier Gutierrez, but he was busy with his film Campeones. The casting director cast Alvaro Morte for the role later, who was famous for his soap opera El Secreto de Puente Viejo. The actor shared that the character was full of surprises, and he enjoyed revealing every fold of the character.

The show was directed by Jesus Colmenar, created by Alex Pina, and the cinematographer of the series was La Vanguardia. Salvador Dali was chosen for the famous heist mask of the show since Dali is an iconic cultural reference to Spain. The idea of the city names of the team members was cool, and it also helped the writer to create subtle suspense to grow the characters slowly and efficiently. However, in the series Professor named his team in city code names to secure the anonymity of the crew from the police. The Professor was planning the big heist of the Royal Mint for years, and he had ensured that every part of it was safe for the plan and his teammates. He also planned it in such a way that no crew knew each other and had personal attachments. However, the plan did not stand out very well as Moscow insisted on bringing his son in the plan; Helsinki and Oslo were cousins, and Rio and Tokyo started a romantic relationship. And the Professor broke his own rule by including his brother Berlin.

In an interview with Lifestyle Magazine the showrunner of the show Money Heist, Alex Pin revealed that the team’s code names based on cities were random. Initially, they were planning to keep the names after planets. And when someone turned up one day wearing a T-shirt with the word Tokyo, that’s how it started. Professor had chosen city names to mislead the police while the process of analyzing them. The crew belonged to different places around the world, and the name of the city is not corresponding to their origin. The naming pattern is a little unconventional for Monica, who was named “Stockholm” due to the speculation of Stockholm Syndrome. However, more than any practical reason, the city names were cool and catchy. In a typical crime movie or show the nicknames generate suspense around the character like in Reservoir Dogs’ as Mr. Pink and Mr. Blue. We are hoping Money Heist season 5 will provide us with some more insights and real names of Bogota and Marseille.

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Source: Money Heist: The Real Reason The Robbers Have City Names