What do they smoke in series and movies?
Tobacco is not a good work partner and that is why it is banned from filming and recording.
Grouxo Marx cigars, Clint Eastwood's cigarettes in Sergio Leone's movies, Bogart lighting a sexy Lauren Bacall's cigarette ... cinema and tobacco have a long and fruitful relationship and there are hundreds of movies in which some character appears smoking, even if only for a moment.
But times change and tobacco has lost the social status it had decades ago. The links between cigarettes and a long list of diseases leave no doubt and the campaigns to get smokers to quit have been noticed in our society. Also in the world of interpretation you can see that effect and today, on our screens, people smoke less than 30 or 40 years ago.
Even so, there are characters that are still linked to the smoke and the cigarette. Tony Soprano or Don Draper - the protagonists of the series 'The Soprano' and 'Mad Men', respectively - would not be the same without a cigarette in hand. Except that what they smoke has little to do with the cigarettes used by actors from other times.
Thus, until a few decades ago, interpreters smoked real tobacco: cigars and cigars that, on the other hand, were common among a large part of the population.
Today, it is almost unthinkable for an actor to be forced to smoke real cigarettes. For these cases, some straws made with herbs are used: they do not contain tobacco and therefore, neither nicotine, which avoids the dangerous addiction of these products.
One of the most common brands in Hollywood is Ecstacy Herbal Cigarettes, which includes among the composition of its products marshmallow, lettuce, sage, clover leaves, apple juice or honey, among others. These cigars are not safe, the brand itself admits, but their effects are much less than those of tobacco and their capacity to create addiction is minimal.
However, groups that fight against tobacco use believe that all scenes with smokers should be eliminated from our screens, in order to prevent series and films from encouraging consumption. In fact, the University of California has a platform, Smoke Free Movies (smoke-free movies, in Spanish), with which it wants to put pressure on the audiovisual industry and that includes listings of films in which not a puff appears.
