The chances of Gael Garcia Bernal putting a foot wrong get slimmer by the day. You would be hard pressed to think of another young actor who makes choices as cleverly as this bright-eyed, pocket-sized 28-year-old Mexican. It has been six short years since Bernal’s first lead role, as a feral tearaway in Amores Perros, but international cinema would be much the poorer without him.
The unusual nature of his appeal is summed up by his appearance in both People’s Hispanic 25 Most Beautiful list and a recent Arthouse Powerhouse top 10 in Paste magazine, in which he came second to Philip Seymour Hoffman. It’s not just that good-quality filmmaking can be cruelly short on eye candy. There is also Bernal’s integrity to admire. That’s the real reason audiences sigh and coo whenever he is on screen — isn’t it? Bernal’s latest film, Babel, reunites him with Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, the director who yanked him out of the Central School of Speech and Drama, in London, midterm to star in Amores Perros. “I wasn’t allowed to miss any school,” Bernal says, settling into an armchair in his hotel suite and recalling the circumstances of his big break. “So Alejandro arranged for me to have a medical certificate saying I had caught a tropical disease last time I was in Mexico.” He even received “Get well soon” cards from classmates, and returned with his head still shaved from the role, which corresponded perfectly with his story. He lets slip a mischievous chuckle, as though there’s still a possibility that he could have his knuckles rapped over the incident.
But if the principal wants a word, he will have to wait his turn like everyone else. After making films with artistic heavyweights such as Alfonso Cuaron (Y tu mama tambien), Pedro Almodovar (Bad Education) and Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries), Bernal is a man in demand. In Babel, already a Golden Globe frontrunner, with seven nominations, and a sure-fire Oscar contender, he shares the screen with Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. The film brings together four apparently disparate stories set in Morocco, Japan and Mexico, with Bernal appearing in the last location as Santiago, a reckless hombre who lands himself in a spot of bother with a border guard.
From the moment Bernal flashes his goofy but lupine grin, we suspect this guy is trouble. Partly, that’s because Babel, like Iñarritu’s last film, 21 Grams, operates on the same principle as a disaster movie: you find yourself laying bets on what terrible fate will befall which character, and in what order. But Bernal makes Santiago intriguingly unpredictable. When he wrings a chicken’s neck, or alarms fellow wedding guests by firing his gun into the sky, he’s just being high-spirited. His worst is yet to come.
“Santiago makes some mistakes that are fuelled by alcohol,” Bernal explains, toying with his glasses and looking laid-back but suave in a shirt, black jeans and black leather jacket. When we last met, nearly three years ago, he resembled a drama student on his gap year; these days, his dress sense and manner have a more reserved, cautious air. “But the character is also a means for showing this resentment and craziness that you encounter whenever you cross the border from Mexico to the USA. It’s humiliating — you have to demonstrate your innocence before you can cross. The fact that you’re greeted with suspicion, and with a gun, can be intimidating.”
He stops short and offers a tight smile. “Then again, I wouldn’t want to give it too much importance.”
Bernal expresses this same concern, about exaggerating any grievances, later in our conversation. When I ask if he was affected as a youth by the dominant images of his home country — portrayed by Hollywood as a dangerous place full of sleazy people — he shrugs off the suggestion. “Depends on the day. Depends how you’re feeling. Usually, you don’t give a shit. It’s just movies. You’re aware of those images, but you don’t want to give them undue importance. Should we start a revolution because people are making bad films about us? We should instead make our own movies, and make them good. Indirectly, a film like Babel is the best way of balancing things.”
But the tensions between Mexico and the USA under the Bush administration are a source of anxiety to him. He believes that this year’s strike, on May 1, by mostly Latino immigrant workers across the country — in which more than 1m people protested against plans to toughen immigration laws — was heartfelt but ineffective. “It was talked about for a while,” he says sadly, “but then everything went silent. It didn’t make a difference in any practical sense. And they’re still building the wall.” Bernal is referring to the 700-mile fence that is being planned to keep illegal immigrants out of the USA. Objections have been raised by individual states, rendering uncertain the project’s future. “But all those complaints are on economic rather than moral grounds,” Bernal points out perceptively. “If they had the money, it would be built already.”
Most film stars hitch themselves to a cause at some point in their career, but with Bernal the political commitment is in his marrow. If he believes in something, he will speak out about it. When he appeared at the Academy Awards ceremony in 2003, to introduce a song from the film Frida, he declared that Frida Kahlo would have railed against the war on Iraq if she were still alive. In an industry that’s as conservative and paranoid as Hollywood, that counts as putting your neck on the line. “Latin Americans grow up politicised,” he explains. “Your politics are not divorced from who you are as a person — you’re soaked in it. The military dictatorships were all in the recent past, within my memory, and that informs my life. Imagine how politicised all those Iraqi kids are going to be in 10 years’ time.”
This thinking is reflected in a number of Bernal’s films, including The Motorcycle Diaries, in which he made a persuasive Che Guevara (having already played him once, in the TV movie Fidel). As the film followed Guevara from dalliances with beautiful señoritas to confrontations with exploitative capitalists and work in a leper colony, there was a palpable sense of awakening on Bernal’s face: you could see him becoming wiser and more empowered as the film progressed. And while Y tu mama tambien, with Bernal and his close friend Diego Luna as libidinous teenagers on the road with an older woman, looked like a sex comedy, it became something altogether more serious. For all its ribald tomfoolery and explicit sex scenes (Bernal was required to get it on with both his co-stars), the picture had a political message that resonated with the actor.
“Looking at it objectively, I think Y tu mama tambien is an important film,” he says proudly. “It’s a true, honest analysis of society. In some ways, it has links with The Motorcycle Diaries, where the characters are travelling and bonding with other cultures. But in Y tu mama tambien, these guys are in a bubble. The audience sees what they are going through, but the boys don’t really experience it — they just want to have sex.”
So far, Bernal has largely resisted the lure of Hollywood, preferring to live and work in Mexico. Despite rumours that he would appear in last year’s Goal! and the forthcoming The Bourne Ultimatum, his only US movie to date is The King, in which he played a drifter who insinuates himself into the new family of his estranged father. “I’m doing what I want to do,” he reflects. “There’s no reason for me to take on anything that doesn’t excite me just because the English-speaking world expects me to follow a certain path.” Career strategies simply don’t concern him. For Bernal, acting is fun above all else.
“It’s one of the weirdest jobs in the world,” he concedes. “But it’s one of the best therapies, one of the greatest ways to be free. It’s something you can do in order to enjoy the rest of your life. Like all great joys, it has its risks. You feel vulnerable. Someone hurts your feelings and you get really down. When things go well, it lasts a week. When they don’t, it destroys you. But it’s all play, and it liberates me in every sense.”
That’s blindingly apparent in another of his upcoming films, The Science of Sleep, an out-to-lunch comedy from Michel Gondry (Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) in which Bernal plays a young illustrator unable to distinguish between dreams and reality. “That’s what I’m talking about,” he raves when I mention the picture. “Everything on that movie was so playful. All the elements were there to have fun. Man, I love that film.” He also speaks highly of the experience of making Deficit, his first outing as a director, though he won’t say a word about the movie itself, which he’s busy editing. “I don’t know how it’s going to turn out,” he admits, before adding: “But I want to do another.”
Not that he hasn’t got enough on his plate. He’s just finished a film with the eminent Brazilian director Hector Babenco, and is preparing for one with Carlos Cuaron (brother of Alfonso). Bernal also formed a production company with Luna a year ago, through which they have overseen four movies with “strong, personal visions”. Then there’s the travelling film festival he has established, which has brought obscure or censored documentaries to Mexican audiences. As far as I can ascertain, he hasn’t yet secured world peace or rescued any endangered species. Knowing him, that’s next year.
Babel opens on January 19, The Science of Sleep on February 16
