Why the notoriously reserved Rafael Nadal bared his soul for Netflix's 'Rafa'

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Set us as preferred Throughout his career, Rafael Nadal was famously a man of few words.But in Oscar-nominated director Zach Heinzerling’s four-part Netflix series “Rafa,” which juxtaposes Nadal’s farewell season with a rich trove of archival footage, the Spanish tennis legend opens up about the emotional and physical costs of greatness.“For me, if you do a documentary, it’s about telling the real story; you don’t want to create a story of just roses,” Nadal says on a video call from his home office in Mallorca.

While he had previously turned down offers to star in documentaries, Nadal felt the time was right to commemorate his playing days — if not for himself, then for his notoriously private family.In late 2023, Heinzerling — whose previous high-profile subjects include Beyoncé and Paul McCartney — followed Nadal for two weeks in Australia as the 22-time Grand Slam champion attempted to mount one last comeback from a hip surgery that had sidelined him for nearly a year.Then, just six days into filming, a new hip injury forced Nadal to withdraw from the Australian Open, casting a shadow over his final months on the professional circuit.“It created a bond between the [filmmaking] team and Rafa’s team because we had witnessed something quite vulnerable,” Heinzerling says.

The documentary soon evolved from a potential fairy tale into a rumination on one question: “When his body is saying ‘stop,’ why does he decide to keep going?”Heinzerling’s crew earned privileged access to Nadal’s family — many of whom had never been interviewed on camera before — and cultivated trust by first traveling with them sans cameras before conducting formal interviews in Spanish.Yet the director considers the series’ standout moments to be those in Mallorquin, Nadal’s native Catalan dialect, in which the athlete appears at his most natural.

“That is the most intimate and real versio...