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

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 version of Rafa you could ever get,” Heinzerling says of those scenes. “Rafa’s actually very funny, and sometimes in Spanish and in interviews, he can come across quite formal or serious. So those slice-of-life moments were essential.”

The documentary argues that Nadal was addicted to competition, often at the expense of his own health. Following his 2005 breakout season, he was diagnosed with Müller-Weiss syndrome, which causes a malformation of the navicular bone in the midfoot. Instead of undergoing a potentially career-ending surgery, he played with a custom-made orthotic, which contributed to years of cascading injuries — mostly to his hips, knees and back. In the series, he admits to having taken so many anti-inflammatories that he now has two small perforations in his intestines.

“Rafa” also reveals the fragile inner workings behind Nadal’s legendary resilience. His obsessive court rituals — including meticulously aligning his water bottles and executing his precise pre-point routines — were not merely superstitions, but coping mechanisms in a high-stress, solitary sport. By 2015, however, crippling anxiety and loss of control left him so overwhelmed that he carried a water bottle everywhere, terrified that he might choke on his own saliva.

Relieved to live now without chronic physical pain, Nadal insists that his decision to open up about those dark periods was born out of a desire to “normalize” conversations around mental health, especially among young men. “I was not able to understand the things that I went through because I had everything; I won everything. So why was I going through all this process of being anxious on court, to not be able to control my emotions, my breathing?” Nadal says. “But the truth is … I was not able to fix it by myself, so I needed some help.”

Alongside his parents, Nadal credits his uncle and longtime coach, Toni, with instilling his trademark mental toughness. He believes Toni’s strict training regimen, often criticized as overly harsh, was precisely what allowed him to maximize his potential.

“I think that if Toni realized that I was not able to deal with the pressure in every practice, with the intensity that he pushed me to put in every single day, he will take another route to try to help me to be my best version possible,” Nadal adds, noting that his relationship with Toni has only gotten “more positive” since retiring. “But I think he detected that I was ready for what he thought was the best way to help me to become better and stronger mentally.”

Nadal’s story would have felt incomplete without including his greatest rivals, Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic. The “Big Three” combined to win 66 of 81 Grand Slams played between 2003 and 2023, but Nadal is particularly “proud” that, over the years, “we have been a positive example [to the next generation] in terms of respecting each other.”

Federer even recently brought his family to visit Nadal’s revamped tennis academy in Mallorca, and the two played golf together with Federer’s two teen daughters. (In case anyone was wondering, Nadal is a better golfer than Federer, but the latter has been practicing so much that “the gap is much smaller than one year ago,” Nadal jokes. “He has a great swing, much better than [mine].”)

Nearly two years into retirement, Nadal now sees tennis from a new vantage point. Though he closely follows the Grand Slams, checks weekly tournament results and runs his academy, he no longer feels the itch to compete. He has now traded match play for the business arena, where he happily confirms his trademark matador edge remains intact. “For me, the biggest success is that I finished my career knowing that I couldn’t give much more,” he says.

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.