At 51, with a screen career spanning more than three decades, Antonio Banderas is suddenly glad to be grey, writes TARA BRADY
‘AND HEY!” Antonio Banderas jumps up from behind the PR girl who just entered the room. She laughs and apologises with faux annoyance. He monkeys some more: crouching and springing, you understand, is just the Banderas way. Even when he sits down with a cigarette – well, we are in Paris – there are bundles of clownish muscles in play. He twists, he jerks, he beams as he speaks, sometimes to emphasise a point, but mostly to entertain. “It’s good to be silly,” he suggests. “Especially at my age.”
At 51, with a screen career spanning more than three decades, Banderas is suddenly glad to be grey. He had imagined he'd migrate to the other side of the camera by now; he directed his wife, Melanie Griffith in 1999's Crazy in Alabamaand brought a version of Antonio Soler's Englishmen's Road (El camino de los ingleses) to the Berlin Film Festival in 2006.
Perhaps, though, all that “Latin lover crap” has obscured the possibilities open to the elder thespian. “With the new Almodóvar film, I saw myself mature in a movie for the first time. And I was like, huh? I’m not juvenile any more. I never thought or saw myself in that way. But suddenly it’s exciting. Suddenly I see the opportunities there. I’m not stuck.”
Almodóvar's The Skin I Live In, his first film with Banderas since 1990's Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, played at Cannes to thunderously positive notices last year. The freaky Frankenstein fantasy was, says the actor, a huge career moment.
“It was hard,” he says. “He took away all the tricks I’ve learned and accumulated over the years. Poof. Gone. He wanted me fresh. And it was painful. Hold your horses all the time. Don’t give the audience anything. Go smaller, smaller, smaller. It was like working with quantum mechanics. Everything came at the end of the shoot. Like the pieces of a puzzle. Not just for that movie, but why things had happened in the way they had in our lives.”
Did the director and his former muse still have a shorthand after their long separation?
“No, no, no. It was a reinvention. But he did say I was still making the same mistakes I used to 20 years ago.”
Even Banderas’s famous spouse was taken aback by the finished product. “My wife left the theatre and it’s after the premiere and the mood was awesome and we went to a party and she started looking at me weird. And I thought, uh oh, something has happened. We go back to the hotel and she closes the room door and she says, ‘Now I know.’
And I say, ‘Know what?’
‘Now I know why you have been behaving like this for months.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like you haven’t been mean or anything, but you’ve been different. Just different’. And she was right. Almodóvar had turned me inside out. But in a good way.”
It was Almodóvar who first spotted the 19-year-old Banderas on stage and cast the young actor in 1982's Labyrinth of Passion. They made five films together before The Mambo Kings, Banderas's first English- language role, brought him to Hollywood. By then, he was already known to North Americans as the guy Madonna failed to seduce in her 1991 documentary Truth or Dare. Hollywood and Madonna wanted a new Valentino; Banderas had other ideas.
"Other Spanish actors and agents all said the same thing," he recalls. "If you stay in Hollywood you will be playing the bad guy. I thought I would end up wearing a flower in my hair and dancing the flamenco. But I have worked in every single genre. I've done musicals and action films and kids' movies and vampires. I've done dramas like Philadelphiaand The House of Spirits. I've been a pussycat. I have never had a problem."
How did he get around the typecasting everyone warned him about? “Things changed. When I arrived, there was already a strong Spanish community who had worked very hard to send their children to college and the second and third generations were starting to assume positions of power. Hollywood had to open up to the Spanish community. Sadly, I did not change things. They did.”
He hopes that Black Gold, a new desert epic inspired by the birth of the modern oil industry – picture Lawrence of Arabia with more tanks – will similarly change the way Arabs are represented on screen. The most expensive Arabian film ever made sees competing emirs Nesib (Banderas) and Amar (Mark Strong) call a truce on the no-man's land that lies between their respective kingdoms. Amar hands over his two sons – one of whom grows up to be A Prophet's Tahar Rahim – as adoptees, setting an Oedipal rivalry in motion long before American oilmen arrive with news that no-man's land is oozing with gloopy black treasure.
“Where I live and grew up in Málaga, I am surrounded by beautiful Arab culture,” says Banderas. “It’s in the food. It’s in the architecture. And there is something wonderful and very special about the way in Arab culture they play host and welcome you. It is beautiful. But on screen you only see those caricatures of men with 40 wives and camels.”
Black Gold, however, cleverly refuses to yield so much as a proper villain. "These are people in the desert who find themselves on top of a treasure and tremendous unbelievable wealth, enough to move the world. We see how corrupting money can be and my character suffers the most from gold fever. But he's not a bad man. He cares about his people. He's cultured. He wants to progress and raise them up. This is a fantasy, but it's also a debate about what should have been."
The politics may be pertinent, but the lavish cast-of-thousands production is the main attraction. For Banderas, who worked exclusively with blue screen for Robert Rodriguez's Spy Kidsmovies, it was "like being in the middle of a football match every day".
“Can you imagine?” he smiles. “You arrive to work at five in the morning. The sun rising over the horizon and you approach the mountains and there’s 5,000 people and horses in front of you with 400 crew. Every time the trucks come over the horizon, it’s a roar. It’s like thunder. I had never worked on anything this size. They do not make movies of this size any more.”
The Jasmine Revolution further enlivened an already exotic Tunisian and Qatari shoot. “We knew the thing was coming,” recalls Banderas. “I was shooting a scene where the heads of the tribes have gathered together and the local actors were whispering that the ministry of the interior had been taken. Tension was rising all day. At 20 to five that evening, there was shouting and screaming. Everybody out! Everybody out! And everybody starting embracing one another saying, ‘good luck man’.
“We were taken to a hotel where the French and Germans were all leaving the country. This running man recognised me and starts shouting, ‘Antonio! Antonio! I am running and cheering for the first time in my life. You were here. Remember!’ We knew we were in the middle of history, and some of that excitement fed into the movie.”
For Banderas, a political activist since the post-dictatorial La Movida Madrileña scene, Tunisia is one of the most important spots on the globe right now. “We need for Tunisia to work,” he says. “There are so many problems in Syria and Egypt. Tunisia has to lead the way.”
A newshound who has appeared in party political broadcasts on behalf of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party, Banderas has an impressive grasp of geopolitics and gives the best breakdown of the collapse of Lehman Brothers we’ve ever heard.
“Things must change,” he says. “The people occupying Wall Street are not all pushing a socialist agenda. They simply want a restitution of democracy. Politicians are now more movie stars than movie stars . They are too busy chasing votes as family men to actually be family men. And people know. They have realised that they are ruled by markets they mostly know nothing about.
“They’re asking simple, straight questions. How is it possible we are paying these bankers to lose money and pay themselves bonuses when small business can’t get credit? Why is nobody doing anything? We cannot live in this pyramid we have created anymore. We cannot keep thinking about bigger houses and bigger cars. The system is rotten.”
He talks about growing up in Andalucia and coming of age alongside Spanish democracy. Most of the things he knows now, he says, were things he learned back then.
“Life has been very generous to me,” he says. “But I was happy before I ever had a penny in my pocket. My mother calls me up when she’s watching the news at night. ‘A man just killed his wife. It’s terrible. The world is gone crazy.’ But I think there are 50 million marriages like mine that are actually very happy. Nobody says that at the end of the news. But they should. Fear and panic are not useful for anyone.”
He laughs. “Not even when you are working for Almodóvar.”
Hollywoods longest lasting marriages
Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith met on the set of
Too Muchin 1995 and were married within the year. Their 17-year marriage is one the longest lasting in the movieverse. But they still have some catching up to do
Martin Sheen married childhood sweetheart Janet Templeton in 1961. They celebrated their 51st anniversary in December
Kirk Douglas and Anne Buydens, married in 1954. The German movie producer has been the second Mrs Douglas for 58 years now
Academy Award record holder Meryl Streep married sculptor Don Gummer more than four decades ago, in 1978
