The Boy Who Ate Cardboard Became a Screen Actor

Roly Serrano is an Argentine actor who was born in a small town in the province of Salta, where his father worked as the postmaster. In an August 2018 appearance on the Telefe talk show PH, Podemos Hablar, reported by La Voz de San Justo and Caras, he described what he called the hardest stage of his life.

He said that after his parents married, his mother faced hostility from her husband's relatives, who took her children and drove her out of the province. He recalled that his uncles mistreated him and his siblings, tying him up and whipping him, using the children as servants and locking him in the bathroom. At 13, after he broke a bottle and threatened his uncle, he said, there was no longer any food for him at the table.

He then lived on the street from about the age of 13 until he was a little over 14. To ease the hunger, he said, he ate cardboard. In his words, he ate cardboard so that the hunger would pass.

He also said that his mother left and never came looking for her children. His wife, Marcela, encouraged him to search for her.

The articles do not say how he came off the street, and they do not describe his career in detail. They identify him as an actor, and in the available information he is a veteran of Argentine film and television. What they record is a childhood in which a boy of 13 was left to fend for himself, and an adult who chose to speak about it publicly on a prime-time programme.