Antonio Banderas shuffles into his Berlin hotel suite and rests his face on
the table in front of him. “I am so tired!” he groans. “My kingdom for a
pillow!”
He is not living up to his reputation as a fiery sex symbol today. Shorter and
squatter than his swashbuckling, heel-clicking, nostril-flaring screen image
suggests, Banderas has been promoting his latest labour of love on the film
festival circuit for weeks. And it shows. He looks dog-tired. He looks older
than his 46 years. He looks, frankly, as though he has been sleeping face
down in a ditch.
But, boy, he can still talk. He may occasionally slip into pidgin English when
the real stuff escapes him, but Banderas is unstoppable about his new
ensemble drama, El Camino de los Ingleses.
Based on a novel by his childhood friend Antonio Soler, this bittersweet tale
of growing pains is set in 1970s Spain. Directed by Banderas with a certain
rough poetry, it took the Hollywood exile back to his native Málaga for the
longest stretch of time in almost 30 years. A real sentimental journey.
“It was interesting, not only to go back to that time but to my home town,” he
says. “At that time it was forbidden to dream in Spain. I suppose because
the country was very closed to the exterior world, we had a certain complex
of inferiority. But when I read the novel what caught my attention was that
he makes no allusion to that. There are no politics in the movie, no
religion. He put the characters in a bubble and in that way he made them a
bit more open internationally.”
During his own adolescence, Banderas found the politics of Franco’s fascist
regime harder to escape. During his teens he felt “totally trapped by the
circumstances of my country”. While a student actor he was arrested several
times for performing left-wing drama, which was especially embarrassing for
the son of a policeman.
“I remember playing Bertolt Brecht, on stage at the University in Málaga, and
seeing the shine on the helmets of the cops in the wings,” he says with a
grin. “We finish the performance, we take the bow, the curtain goes down –
then we were handcuffed and went to the police station! Ha! They didn’t do
anything to us, just scared us a little. Once I was arrested and my father
was in the police station when I arrived.”
Banderas was initially a promising footballer, a career path scuppered by a
broken foot when he was 14. When he shifted his sights towards acting, his
father and mother, a teacher, were less than thrilled. “They acted in the
worst way they could: they just laughed,” says Banderas. “For them it was a
world of whores and prostitutes and maricóns, homosexuals.”
Coincidentally, that was precisely the sleazy, glamor-ous demimonde that
Pedro Almodóvar began putting on Spanish screens in the liberated postFranco
Spain of the 1980s. By casting the young Banderas in five films, including
several gay roles, the maverick director helped to propel him to
international fame and acclaim. His parents, though, were horrified: “When
my mother saw Law of Desireshe almost had to go to a psychiatrist
for a month!” El Camino de los Ingleses is being retitled Summer
Rain in English-speaking markets, although a British distributor has yet
to be found – perhaps because Banderas resisted the advice of his producers
by staying behind the camera. Reviews in Spain have so far been mixed, but
the actor turned director takes heart from his film-making mentor.
“The first years of Almodó-var were not nice,” Banderas says. “I remember
going around the world with his movies and we were kicked big time! It was
not until the fifth or sixth movie that people started saying: ‘OK, I know
what you mean . . .’ Then they respected him. It’s a process that takes
years.”
After almost a decade with Almodóvar, Banderas took his first faltering steps
into Hollywood. When he was making The Mambo Kings (1992) his
English was still so rough that he had to learn his dialogue phonetically.
But his roles in high-profile projects such as Philadelphia, Interview
with a Vampire and Evitasoon proved his versatility and
charisma.
With his second marriage, to the actress Melanie Griffith ( pictured
below right with Banderas) in 1996, Banderas achieved Hollywood royalty
status. The couple’s volatile relationship frequently makes headlines, with
constant rumours of affairs and even a brief separation in 2002. But he
talks of Griffith tenderly, and makes a point of personally thanking her for
her patience in the credits to El Camino de los Ingleses.
“She doesn’t want to have a husband who says: ‘I should have gone and directed
that movie but you didn’t allow me to.’ She’s very smart.”
Unlike some European exports to Hollywood, such as Colin Farrell and Jude Law,
Banderas is often still type-cast as a smouldering sex symbol. This
sometimes works in his favour, as when the director Robert Rodriguez made
smartly self-conscious use of the star’s looks in his El Mari-achi
and Spy Kids series. But serious dramatic roles have eluded him in
recent years.
Banderas says that his parents finally offered their approval of his career
after his lucrative mainstream outings, first as Zorro and then as the voice
of Puss in Boots in Shrek 2. With a third Shrek due this
June, and even a Puss in Boots spin-off film scheduled for 2010, the star
offers no apologies for taking big-budget roles to finance his more personal
projects.
“I can do a movie like El Camino de los Ingleses because I buy
my freedom, in a way, with Zorro or Shrek,” he says. “By
the way, I don’t renounce them – I had a lot of fun playing those
characters. I think Zorro is a beautiful character. If you’re trying to make
Zorro like Ingmar Bergman then it is just stupid. But movies are
made for many different reasons.”
After years of habitually checking his box-office and popularity ratings in
Hollywood, Banderas claims that he “forgot how difficult it was to be free”.
But returning to Málaga, he says, gave free rein to his true, emotionally
charged Spanish soul. “I have to be sincere with myself, even if this is too
much,” he insists. “That’s the way I am. I am Andalusian! I am baroque! And
I’m surrealist! I have to be sincere.”
Banderas is almost bab-tion takes hold. Minders loom to bundle him off to his
next appointment – with a hotel bed. There is just time to ask the
football-loving Banderas his opinion of David Beckham leaving Real Ma-drid
for Hollywood. Smart move or dead end?
“I think he’s a great player, I really do,” Banderas says. “Not like some
people say, because he’s handsome and takes care of himself. No, he’s a real
player . . . I think he should have stayed.”
He means Beckham, of course. But maybe, at some level, Banderas is also
talking bling now, as sleep depriva- about himself.
