When Passion Meets Pressure — The World Behind Through My Window 3
When Netflix released the final segment of the hugely successful Spanish romantic trilogy, Through My Window 3: Looking at You, fans were expecting fireworks, both emotional and sensual. What fans didn’t know was the duress and transformation that went into making it. Under the glitzy veneer of the film, with its stormy relationships and fiery beach romances lay exhaustion, creative distress, and personal metamorphoses.
Again, directed by Marçal Forés, and with Clara Galle and Julio Peña Fernández, the movie finished the trilogy and the journey of Raquel and Ares, whose love over the three films was consumed by obsession, spanned over distances, and was riddled with heartbreak. But, while the first two films rode the wave of the fandom’s hype, Looking at You was delivered with greater expectations.
A Love Story at the Edge of Growing Up
In Through My Window 3, Raquel and Ares are no longer the impulsive teens we first encountered years earlier. Life, distance, and disillusionment have changed them. The story begins with Raquel returning to Barcelona following an extended time abroad and attempting to reconnect with Ares. The connection feels both familiar and alien.
They’re adults now, which means there’s some emotional baggage to contend with. Gone are the days when love was just about seduction; now, it’s about endurance. Relationships, this one in particular, hover around the balance of nostalgia and resentment, of who they were and who they have become.
This shift was also palpable to the audience who had followed the trilogy. The sensuous fantasy of the first film evolved to the more stark and raw Looking at You. The emotional weight of the characters were mirrored in the emotionally draining performances the cast had to give, and this was no emotional fatigue metaphor — it was real and often painful.
The burden of fictional weight felt familiar, and many begin to wonder — what was it about this trilogy that made the audience feel and resonate so deeply? The first film catapulted Clara Galle to international fame and her social media was flooded with Juliet, teenage, and ultimate love fantasy windows.
But, there was another side of fame, the one that came with debilitating pressure to be flawless, perfectand to psychologically prepare herself to carry a complete franchise.
By the time filming for Looking at You began, Galle admitted to feeling exhausted. The long hours, the intense scenes, and the constant focus had taken a toll. The character Galle was playing, Raquel, was a character who was also experiencing burnout and emotional conflict. Galle’s reality was eerily reflected in the character she was playing.
During a Spanish talk show, Clara referred to the character Raquel, and stated, “She was tired, and so was I. Sometimes I didn’t know where she ended and I began.”
For the final chapter, she collaborated with director Marçal Forés and a dialect coach. Galle wanted Raquel’s lines to sound more mature and more self-aware. The pressure of shooting for a franchise finale and her character’s physical demands most of the time left her emotionally raw. Crew members spoke about the time Galle would stay back after her scenes and ‘perform’ the character, making all the decisions she was supposed to.
The deep emotional conflict made her performance all the more captivating.
Julio Peña’s Battle with Burnout and Expectation
If Clara personified Raquel’s fragility, Julio Peña was Ares’s internal war. He transitioned from a ‘young heartthrob’ during the early Netflix aulas to becoming the leading face of Netflix’s Spanish heartthrobs. This new identity, of a heartthrob, conditioned expectations and resulted in typecasting, leading to exhaustion.
During production, and in addition to filming, Peña was also responsible for juggle a seamless production of a music album and a tour to promote the album. Sources indicate he was so exhausted during the first week of filming, he collapsed during a rehearsal and fainted on set, a fact he mentioned during interviews in a dismissive manner, although crew members described it as a “wake-up moment.”
Ares’s character in Looking at You is a reflection of Ares’s eponymous actor as he carries the guilt of failing to love, balancing the ambition with love. In a conversation described by several as “pee-through” Forés encouraged Peña to channel that conflict into performance, giving Ares a new dimension in his most vulnerable portrayal yet.
“In his eyes, you could see it,” Forés explained to a Spanish outlet. “It wasn’t a performance. He was really tired. Tired of the fame, tired of the expectations, tired of the belief that love or art could solve everything. That is what made Ares human.”
Battling Adverse Conditions in Through My Window 3
Friction was intrinsic to the production of Through My Window 3, just as it was to the emotional landscape of the film. Shooting happened in coastal Spain and Portugal, where the weather was erratic and often impeded progress. One romantic sequence – a reunion scene set on a beach – fell prey to destructive storms that obliterated portions of the set, forcing the crew to hastily rebuild and reshoot under a compressed schedule.
Tight budgets also proved problematic. Global restructuring led to Netflix cutting production budgets, and the Through My Window crew had to manage with fewer staff and tighter shooting deadlines. Cinematographer Eduard Grau explained that the decision to exclusively use natural light for shooting was as much a creative choice as it was a necessity due to the limited budget. This choice significantly contributed to the film’s organically melancholic tone.
At one point, a stomach flu outbreak among the crew members for the film delayed shooting for just under a week, which in turn created a logistical nightmare for post-production. Nonetheless, that** str**uggle seems to have created emotional layers to the film, every frame infused with a measure of exhaustion, capturing imperfections, reflecting the messy reality of life that doesn’t follow a script.
Friendship and Friction Behind the Camera
Having worked together for nearly three years, the principle cast had established a familial relationship that, like any family, was accompanied with creative friction. Clara and Julio, famous for their on-screen chemistry, were said to get into heated arguments around the foundation of their scenes. Clara aimed for Raquel’s ending to feel final, while Julio leaned toward the closure being open and ambiguous.
Marçal Forés converted their disagreement into a piece of directorial guidance. “I told them, don’t solve it — live it. Let that tension be,” he said. This created some of the most effective scenes in the film, most notably the final confrontation between Raquel and Ares, which was layered with raw frustration and love that reflected the off-screen emotional turbulence the actors were experiencing.
Even supporting actors, including Hugo Arbues and Natalia Azahara, mentioned how the impact of their characters made it hard to bid farewell. Ending the shooting felt like an emotional balance of laughter, tears, and silence. On that night, Clara posted, “We started as kids. We leave as people who’ve been broken, healed, and changed — just like Raquel and Ares.”
Art Imitating Life — and Life Answering Back
Watching Through My Window 3, one can feel the emotional exhaustion beneath the beauty. The glossy cinematography conceals the effort to make it. The aching glances between lovers carry the weight of real fatigue, real growth, real goodbyes.
The trilogy’s end isn’t simply about love; it’s about closure — something the cast and audience required. The final film mirrors the journey of creative production: full of passion, conflict, and the bittersweet recognition that even the most intense love stories must one day let go.
For Clara Galle and Julio Peña, Looking at You became more than just a project. It became an important lesson, as well as for their characters, that beauty and pain often come in the same breath.