Spanish actor Antonio Banderas, star of many a film by Pedro Almodovar, has broken camp and taken up English with showy parts in Philadelphia, The House of the Spirits and the upcoming Interview with the Vampire.
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Outside of action flicks, when's the last time someone with a seven-syllable name who pronounces "kiss" with a long "e" became a Hollywood movie star? There isn't exactly a permanent Valentino niche that Tinseltown feels obliged to fill. But when someone like Spanish actor Antonio Banderas comes along, well...
Fans of Spanish director Pedro Almodovar know Banderas as the star of five of that director's sex comedies, including Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! But Banderas, already a European movie star, is about to be seen on American screens in American movies that will, with some luck, turn him into the star that last year's The Mambo Kings, in which he played Armand Assante's soulful, trumpet-blowing brother, did not. In Jonathan Demme's Philadelphia, that much-speculated-about comic heartbreaker, Banderas plays the lover of a lawyer (Tom Hanks), who is being defended by a homophobic attorney (Denzel Washington) in an AIDS discrimination case. Also this winter, Banderas romances Winona Ryder under the envious gaze of Meryl Streep and her sister-in-law Glenn Close, in Bille August's movie of Isabel Allende's acclaimed bestseller The House of the Spirits. And he will soon enough be seen with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt as one of a gorgeous trio of vampires in Neil Jordan's version of Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire. In short, Banderas is on a roll.
It's axiomatic that movie stars should exude sex. Banderas emits appeal that borders on the pandemic. Sizzle is rarer in people who can actually act, and as anyone who's seen Banderas in his Almodovar mode knows, this guy can act. But just now, smoldery and liquid-eyed, gregarious and bursting with life, Banderas is discussing the size of his penis. This phallic subject reared its head when I brought up Madonna, who, in her Truth or Dare documentary, revealed her fixation on Banderas, then speculated that, aside from already being married (to actress Ana Leza), Banderas must harbor some other imperfection. For instance, she suggested, a teeny-weeny?
"Madonna never saw my penis, so she doesn't know," asserts the 33-year-old Banderas, laughing with a Castilian lilt that only occasionally shades into Fernando Lamas-ese. "Madonna was the loser, I was the winner of that story." With a grin he adds: "I mean, my wife is the real winner of that story."
So how did he turn up in Truth or Dare anyway? Banderas leans in close, as if about to reveal a confidence: "The real thing that happened was, I went to a Madonna concert in Madrid. I couldn't speak English that well. Anyway, I was at a table at a party Pedro [Almodovar] gave and I saw cameras, but I thought it was the TV news, you know? I never felt that she was going to do a movie. I mean, she never put a paper in front of me to sign, saying, 'Do you want to be in this documentary?' And, during that dinner, she was telling me--oh, I don't know what--while all the time I am nodding and saying, 'Yes, yes, yes,' not understanding a word.
When someone called and said, 'Antonio, you are in Madonna's movie,' I said, 'Impossible.' Then she called me saying, 'Antonio, don't be worried, you are treated like a king in my movie. I'm gonna send you the cassette and if you don't like it, I promise to take it out.' So, when my wife and I saw the movie, heard what she said about me, we just laughed and laughed."
Joys of mutual exploitation aside, Banderas laments not having gotten to play revolutionary Che Guevara opposite Madonna's Evita Peron in the apparently doomed Disney movie version of that all-singing spectacle Evita. "I love musicals," he declares, cracking up when he notices my arched brow. Offering to croon me any show tune I choose (an offer I decline), he insists, "Oh, yes, for real I love them. It's like an American going to Spain and getting interested in bullfights. Before I saw Hair onstage in Spain in 1973, I had only seen classical theater with my parents and thought, Wow! This is extraterrestrial! It actually made me start taking classes in theater and doing shows.
Singin' In the Rain? I know all the songs-- The Phantom of the Opera and also Guys and Dolls, too. Evita was very sad because Madonna had called me and said, 'Antonio, you have to have a meeting with [director] Glenn Gordon Caron.' I spent one whole afternoon at Disney meeting people and recording songs. A week later, [producer] Robert Stigwood called me from Bermuda and said, 'Antonio, you've got the part and we're going to do it.' I thought, Wow, a big musical production for the cinema with Madonna, who was perfect for that character! Finally, the budget was--" he slices the air with an imaginary knife, "and I don't think it's gonna be done. Ever."
I would have said, "So, you were the winner in that Madonna story, too," except that Banderas's disappointment is palpable.
Banderas's small but important role in Philadelphia, December '93's most buzzed-about entry, may do more for him than a turn as Che would have. Banderas calls director Jonathan Demme, who brought us Hannibal Lecter in 1991's The Silence of the Lambs, "the funniest man on earth." All flashing eyes and roaming hands, Banderas enthuses about how one can "feel that [Demme] is coming from underground movies. He loves Almodovar's Law of Desire, for example. We shot a Halloween party scene and he came dressed and shot the scenes in a flowery shirt, Bermuda shorts, sunglasses, and a big camera and Hawaiian flowers around his neck. There was never a tension there at all. I loved the way he used the camera, like the way they usually show a bad guy in a terror movie walking through a hallway, looking for someone to kill."
Like handheld or Steadicam? "Si, si," Banderas says, then laughs at his lapse. "Exactly. Rough, even though it was a big budget movie: informal, strange, busy, energetic." Energetic, sure, but, even for a resilient, kinetic guy, a bit unsettling. "Jonathan shoots things lots of ways, so I don't know how he's going to edit the movie," he admits.
"Like, one scene when I come to visit Tom Hanks in the hospital, we shot in a normal way. You know: my take, Tom's take. Then, he had me looking and talking directly to the audience, as if they were Tom in the hospital bed, which is very good. I even had to put my hand 'on' the camera, saying, 'You got a fever, baby? Oh, boy, honey, you have to be careful...' So, right now, the movie is like a mystery because I don't know how it is going to be put together. Maybe my character won't be so big as I think or maybe it is. I'm proud to be in this movie. It's funny, very human--Tom's sarcasm in his character makes him so great and it is about many things that are important."
Important, sure. Let's just hope Philadelphia is not all noble and stereotypical, like other such Hollywood attempts to tackle aspects of gay life. For instance, is this a movie where Banderas and Hanks deep kiss and romp in bed the way off-screen lovers do? "We have one kiss," Banderas explains, "and it's so natural. I come in to see him and we kiss like brothers. You will see, people will be easy with it within 10 seconds. We have another scene in bed that I don't know if it's going to be edited. Tom's in bed and I come in and tell him a story in a funny way about how a guy in the gym said to me, 'How do you feel knowing your boyfriend's gonna die?' And I tell him I said, 'How do you know you're not gonna die first, bitch?' When I look back, he's sleeping and I put my head on his shoulder. It's done in a very natural way. Some people are not going to realize what is happening."
How does a budding sex god handle any flack his career advisors might hand him about playing a gay man in such a high-profile movie? "All that stuff is changing," he counsels, shrugging it off. "Look at the work Elizabeth Taylor has done for AIDS awareness. The people [this movie] attracted, like Tom, Denzel Washington, Joanne Woodward, Mary Steenburgen, Jason Robards, all wanted to be in an entertaining story that also had something to show. None of them thought twice about it." His eyes brim as he relates a story of his final shooting day on the movie, when he casually said to a crew member, who has AIDS, "See you at the premiere." His coworker replied, "If I'm still alive." Banderas observes, "He didn't say it feeling sorry for himself or anything. It just was a fact of life. And I don't know if I will see him there, either."
Relating this story, his eyes burn with fierce empathy that makes one certain he's more than an adroit technician using his mojo to appear politically correct. He radiates sweet, all-embracing openness, uncommon in any being let alone an actor, that adds just the right touch of sugar to his salsa. From the first, directors have been struck by this.
Banderas made his movie debut at 22 in Pedro Almodovar's Labyrinth of Passion and became part of the director's repertory company for several years. But in 1989, Banderas slipped out of Almodovar's High Heels at the last minute to do The Mambo Kings instead. It's not that Banderas has never starred in a film for anyone else--he's worked for Carlos Saura and Felix Rotaeta, for instance. But Almodovar is different, a guy Banderas calls "the kind of person who'd rip the skin off your body to see what's going on inside."
How did Banderas feel about making the break and taking on the challenge of English-language films? "I was working with him in five films for 10 years. I didn't think: 'It's time to break out of the relationship.' I decided to do another step, breathe new air, fly away and know other people. And Hollywood, all around the world, is something for an actor."
Was the director, whose movies turned Banderas global, steamed by his apparent defection? "At first, he was a little bit upset with me," Banderas admits. "I went to his home one night in Madrid and told him, 'Pedro, listen, they offered me [The Mambo Kings], I want to do it.' I knew he couldn't tell his movie team of 40, 50 people, 'We'll have to wait for Antonio.' And he decided to do High Heels with Miguel Bose instead. And it was great. Pedro gave me a picture of him and me in New York that he signed: 'Mambo Kings play sad songs.' But now, we can talk by phone and are still friends. He was disappointed. So was I. But we are very young people and we are going to work together in the future. I am sure of that."
After a moment, Banderas admits wistfully, "It was a very strange sensation to go with my wife, Pedro and Miguel [Bose] to the opening night of High Heels in Madrid. Opening nights of Pedro's movies all over Europe are big events. You see, everybody thought Almodovar would have power a year, two, but not forever. He's smarter than that. A problem we Spanish have is that only when someone becomes celebrated all around the world do we recognize them as well. That happened with Pedro. Picasso, too. So, I had been with him to the last consecutive five premieres. But, at this one, it was all about Pedro, Miguel, Victoria Abril and the very good work they had done together. There was a kind of sadness. But that disappeared because The Mambo Kings was coming."
And, as it happened, going. Fast. The failure of The Mambo Kings is surprising considering what Oscar Hijuelos's turbulently sexy, tragic Pulitzer Prize-winner could have been. This is a project at which Martin Scorsese had reportedly taken a long look. Banderas prefers to focus on some of the absurdities of making his American movie bow, not the results. "When I had my first interview in London with [director] Arnold Glimcher," he recalls, giggling, "I only knew three, four lines of English to be used at the right moment. The most important was: 'I can do that.' I was the last one to be cast, so I read with Kevin Kline and Annabella Sciorra, who were going to play my brother and my wife.
So Arnold put me in a Berlitz school in New York for a month to learn English with a bunch of business executives from Japan and France. I saw people crying there, like me, because I thought, I am so stupid I will never learn this language. One month later, the actors I'd read with were both gone; now, it was Armand Assante and Maruschka Detmers and it was different. And then I had to speak with all these big executives at Warner Bros., Terry Semel and all, and I even forgot Spanish. I would use a word like 'bottle,' and be thinking, What a strange word." He adds, shrugging philosophically and shading his voice with a nostalgia that suggests what a soul-shredder he could have been in a better movie, "Still, it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life."
Though the experience of The Mambo Kings was not quite so beautiful for audiences, the movie helped get other American moviemakers to take notice of Banderas. John Badham, for instance, considered Banderas for Point of No Return (and, lucky for Banderas, passed). One hears also that Banderas came within a bat's whisker of stirring hearts and loins as Bram Stoker's Dracula for Francis Ford Coppola.
Es verdad? Banderas breaks into a soulful smile at the memory. "An agent from ICM took me to Francis's home on a Sunday morning. I thought I was going to a Beverly Hills mansion, but it's a very normal home in a very Italian style, like a villa. I rang the bell a long time and nobody was opening the door. But I heard the TV inside. Finally, Francis came to the door with a towel [around his waist], saying, 'Hello, how are you? Please, sit down. Wanna watch some TV?' I found him very familiar, very charming, more like someone from Italy or Spain. Well, you know Francis and wine. We sat with some of his own wine having a very nice, quiet conversation about Italy and mothers. It was Mother's Day and he said, 'You have to call your mother.'"
Anyway, Banderas continues, "A week later, he called and said, 'I'm gonna send you scenes from the script. Would you mind reading to play Dracula?' He made an appointment to meet me in a big empty church on Hollywood Boulevard, where the whole afternoon I read, he whispered very good, strange things like, 'Keep a secret from me. Invent something horrible if you like, say, you killed your mother with a knife and hid her in a suitcase.'
A couple of weeks later, he asked me to come to San Francisco: 'Bring your wife. We'll have a nice day talking, walking.' And we did. The boat from Apocalypse Now was out there. The whole thing was like a living museum. I screen-tested with Winona. And all the while I also tested with my wife, Francis was eating spaghetti, saying, 'Look at your husband. He looks very good, doesn't he?' I didn't get the part, but it was such a nice, strange experience. Like working with a god. Maybe I should write 'My Three Days with Francis.'"
No, Banderas didn't get to chew necks and scenery alongside Winona Ryder and Anthony Hopkins, but he can at least sublimate those vampiric urges (and match cheekbones) with Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and River Phoenix in director Neil Jordan's movie of Interview With the Vampire. Calling himself "a big fan of Anne Rice," Banderas admits signing up to play Armand, a lover of the vampire Lestat "even though I wasn't sure whether Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons or whoever might play Lestat. The script is strange, touching and the [project] has such a long history, years and years, I think it will be interesting to see what Neil Jordan will do with it, especially after The Crying Game." Ironically, the movie's shooting schedule squelched the possibility that Banderas might have starred in director Garry Marshall's comedic movie take on Exit to Eden, another Anne Rice fantasia, about an anything-goes pleasure island for wealthy S&M devotees. (Paul Mercurio from Strictly Ballroom got the part instead.)
Irony also played into Banderas's appearing with Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder and Jeremy Irons in the upcoming movie version of The House of the Spirits, directed by The Best Intentions helmer Bille August and based on Isabel Allende's sweeping, award-winning novel of intergenerational jealousy, psychic powers, social ferment and, of course, amor. "The movie project that first brought me to America was Of Love and Shadows, taken from another Allende work," Banderas explains, adding sadly that the project, hopefully to be directed by Betty Kaplan, has "not yet been made, because of money. But someday. To work with the people of the level that I did in The House of the Spirits was a pleasure." Not the diva-laden, heavy-going affair rumors pegged it as being? Shaking his head in the negative, Banderas insists, enthusiastically, "My memories of it are all very good."
Whatever the outcome of Philadelphia and The House of the Spirits, Banderas's exposure coupled with his thoroughly prepared, easy-going reputation, have spread nice-guy rumors around town. Not a bad thing when you're as good-looking and magnetic as he is. "Directors here want to know if I am malleable," he observes. "I don't go to auditions putting on a character like a new skin. I just try to understand what the director wants of me." But, up close and in his European-made movies, he's not passive and moody the way he came off in The Mambo Kings. "I sometimes have very bad reactions to things, I show a short temper that, later, I always regret," he admits, although he strikes me as muy simpatico, for an actor, anyway. "A doctor in Spain who was examining me put his fingers on my back and that left a mark for hours. He said, 'Wow, that shows that you have a temper.'"
What Banderas never hides is how much he likes to goof. He tells me he found it particularly amusing when Billy Crystal referred to him as the "new sex symbol" who would replace Richard Gere when Banderas and Sharon Stone sexed up the Oscar ceremonies a year and a half ago. Shaking his head, Banderas recalls being served up around town as the tapa picante of the instant.
"It was a strange, strange experience. I remember looking out from the stage at the Oscars seeing Liza Minnelli, Jack Nicholson, Kevin Costner, thinking, What am I doing here? This is not my place. I hadn't seen Basic Instinct at the time, so I didn't even know who Sharon Stone was then, but I tell you, she is smart, funny, an incredible beauty, controversial. We later did a champagne commercial together, and Sharon is perfect to work with Almodovar. Perfect. But the truth is, at the Academy Awards, the only thing I could focus on was that I had bought a pair of new shoes and couldn't bear the pain. My wife and I went to the party afterwards and I met John Singleton and Spike Lee, people I really like, thinking, I either have to leave or take off these shoes, but if I take them off, I'll never be able to put them on again. That Hollywood stuff, cameras flashing, people in the stands screaming, 'Aaarggghhh!' is circus craziness: fun to play with, but that's all it is. At least, being there is something I can tell my grandson about in the future. You know, 'Once, a long time ago...'"
Banderas knows firsthand about fan stuff, Spanish style. "I get a lot of this a few meters behind me," he says, and then, cracking up, leaning behind me, he proceeds to demonstrate: "You be Antonio," he suggests. Mimicking two fans trailing a movie star, he whispers, '"Is that Antonio Banderas?' 'No, he's shorter than that,' "That's him, he only looks taller in real life.'" Point taken.
"Artists are more a part of the normal public in Madrid," Banderas explains. "I'd see the very biggest stars out without any hassle. There, I can go into the street, to the supermarket. Only if I go into a big store, people will ask for my autograph. But they're very nice, very complimentary."
Always? Have any of them, particularly given the erotic aura that trails Banderas like fumes from a cigarillo, crossed a line? His face goes uncharacteristically morose for a moment. Like someone shot out the lights. "A guy got my phone number and was leaving scary messages on my answering machine when I did Law of Desire," he says, referring to Pedro Almodovar's terrific 1987 film in which Banderas plays a charismatic movie director's would-be male lover.
"Continually, for a couple of months, he was telling me, 'You don't know me, but I know you. I'm gonna find you, take you behind some corner and...' From then on, I was watching a little bit all the time--especially at night, if I was going out alone. Someone crazy can come to your city, watch you, find things out about you and scare you really badly. But after that, it stopped. Nothing more. And Spain is not so dangerous as here. In America, everyone has guns. When we were making Philadelphia, it was almost impossible for the stars I was working with just to have a normal night in a restaurant. Not without bodyguards."
Happily, Banderas, a natural born self-spoofer, maintains ironic distance on the prospect of American stardom. "I am moving myself through life with a sense of humor. To me, any other way is ridiculous, disgusting. You see, I never came to America looking for anything. I'm here because someone sent me a good script. If someone calls me from India with a good script, that's where I'm gonna be. I don't want a big limo. I don't care about making a lot of money. If someone calls me from India with a good script, that's where I'm gonna be. I would die to work with David Lynch, with Francis Coppola, but, if I'm not what people are looking for, I'll go home where I have my own work."
So, then, Banderas sees himself as more an actor than a star? Nodding vigorously, he says, "The big difference between a star and an actor is someone who knows the technique, who knows how to learn from everything that happens to him. A star is acting himself all the time. You have to have the energy for that and a nice character. I don't know if I'm that brilliant the whole day. I have my own shit with me all the time and I don't want to lose that. I can't all the time be making this beautiful smile, faking that I'm someone else, because that's insane."
Part of Banderas's balance might stem from the delight he takes in shocking and provoking. This you can see in roles he yearns for, like playing young Mussolini in an Italian production that has been on and off for the past year. Or in the Lovesexy Prince cap he sports in homage to the Purple One. Maybe it isn't surprising that he grew up middle class in balmy, sensual Malaga during Franco's repressive reign in Spain. His father, who served in the secret police, and his mother, who taught school, flipped when he decided to become an actor, entering Malaga's School of Dramatic Arts.
By 21, he had outgrown the local troupe that put on shows in a donated theater, moved to Madrid and, after taking more classes, began making the audition rounds and landing stage roles ("My arithmetical progression," Banderas explains, savoring the sound and the substance of the phrase). He won a five-year stint at Spain's prestigious National Theater, doing everything from Marlowe to Brecht. Now, he says shyly, he is touched that his parents so "love the profession that my mother keeps a scrapbook about me."
Mrs. Banderas may soon need more scrapbooks. Aside from the five movies her son has pending, he wants to raise a family and to direct. Who is he, exactly? "A happy guy," he answers like a shot. "I am just like the waves on the seas, rolling in the wind. In my work, I am looking to be much better, to increase my involvement in movies, in art. I'm in love with the camera." The feeling's mutual.
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Stephen Rebello interviewed James Caan for the October Movieline.