Football, according to Gael García Bernal, “is like music. It has a mystery that will never be solved.” The 30-year-old Mexican actor, Motorcycle Diaries star and swoon-inducing heart-throb says this with his indecently long black lashes hovering half-closed over smoky green eyes. “It is impossible to express why it is so fantastic,” he continues. “So the challenge is to express the joy that is the result of football, and not actually the football itself.”
He does this a lot, Bernal. Speaks in great beguiling sentences, filled with soothing metaphors and paradoxical inquiry. He’s talking about football now, but later, when I ask him if his life has been changed by the arrival of his first baby, Lazaro (currently five months old), he will say: “It has been changed, but in the same way that my relationship with water changed as soon as I went into the sea.”
He will then smile, another dazzling, lashy effort, and hope that the sense within the metaphor has broken through. This is not affectation, or defence, but simply his way. On being nominated by Vanity Fair for its Most Handsome Man in the World poll, he muses: “It feels nice when people say nice things about you, even if they’re talking about your feet.” And on his current status as an increasingly powerful movie producer (two award-winning dramas out this year) and a white-hot Hollywood actor (a Scorsese film is on the way), he says: “If someone put a gun to my head tonight, I would chose to be an actor rather than a producer, and then I would be an audience rather than an actor. Because I like doing films because I like watching them.”
For now though, here, in ripped grey T-shirt, dirty denims and bush-scrub stubble — the very essence of the Most Handsome Man in the World, albeit, at 5ft 6in, the little-brother variant — it’s all about football. It is the subject of his new film, Rudo y Cursi, a crowd-pleasing comedy about two ill-equipped half-brothers from rural Mexico who suddenly land top-tier football careers and all the attendant pressures and tribulations of instant wealth. The film, brought to you by the creative team behind the comedy hit Y Tu Mamá También, including Bernal’s co-star and lifelong buddy Diego Luna, is a football movie that features very little football.
“That was one of the main philosophical discussions that we talked about way before the script was written,” Bernal says. It was a long development process that began as an idea in 2001, during the promotional tour of Y Tu Mamá También and continued throughout the decade with script rewrites and brainstorming sessions. Bernal, for instance, decided that his character, Cursi, should nurture deluded singing ambitions, which inevitably provides the movie with much comedy fodder (including some Liberace-style country and western outfits).
The resulting film thus steers mostly clear of the football pitch and instead takes repeated, and often savagely funny, pot-shots at the tyranny of celebrity that, Bernal says, is swamping Mexico. “The celebrity aspect of this society of spectacle that we live in has become a synonym for success,” Bernal says, beginning a weighty rumination on how celebrity, rather than aristocracy, has become the new class oppressor in his home country. “It’s a very Western idea and it spreads out in a way that is as poisonous as rampant capitalism used to be.”
He’s on a roll now, slipping on a pair of serious black spectacles (Most Handsome Man in the World as university professor). “These guys in the movie have all the elements they need to be happy, but they get drawn into a world that makes them successful yet also denies them the possibility of happiness. In Western culture freedom is confused with happiness. Freedom is having the economic freedom to buy things; it’s not a philosophical search for happiness.”
There is, of course, a lighter side to Bernal. And later he will even joke, momentarily, about his status as a ladies’ man (past flings have included several co-stars and a brief relationship with Natalie Portman), saying: “I would prefer to keep the myth [that he is a babe magnet] going, because it’s a good one to have. But if you must know, it’s not the number but the quality that matters.”
He will chuckle too as he remembers kissing Luna in the climactic “make-out” scene in Y Tu Mamá También. “I was like, ‘How can I kiss my best friend? Will we be able to look at each other in the eyes afterwards?’ But we both just went for it and as soon as we did it that anxiety was gone.”
But mostly Bernal is a political beast, concerned with the moral and philosophical ramifications of the movies he makes and produces. His choices as an actor have been impeccable, and recent standouts, including Babel and Blindness, have explicitly reflected a politically conscientious worldview (both have apocalyptic undertones).
His two new films as a producer, Sin Nombre and I’m Gonna Explode, are dramas that see modern-day Mexico as a place of cruel inequalities and punishing class divides. “Wherever you put the camera in Latin America there’s going to be political complexity to it,” he says.
But his friend and collaborator Gerardo Naranjo (the director of I’m Gonna Explode) suggests that there might be a downside to Bernal’s political purview. “I think it’s a big weight upon his shoulders,” Naranjo says. “He wants to do what is right, and he doesn’t want to mess up. And this can be a burden.”
I ask Bernal how it happened, when did he become so politicised? It began in his childhood. The son of two socially aware actors, and growing up in Mexico City, he was transformed by the effect that the country’s infamously fraudulent 1988 elections had on those around him. “It was obscene, and it affected everybody,” he says. “I was 9 years old and being forced to think deeply about electoral fraud — it made everyone incredibly political.”
At the same time he started acting, but not, he says, because of some inner drive to perform, but because he was a child and he wanted to be close to his parents. “They were in the theatre and I saw them play and I wanted to play too, to be with them,” he says, with a casual and unfussy emotional honesty.
The acting stuck, however, as did the politics, and Bernal gradually became a familiar face in Mexican soaps, playing a brainiac teen called Daniel in The Grandfather and I (think Neighbours, but with extra melodrama) before suddenly quitting acting to study philosophy at Unam, Mexico’s national university. But a strike closed the college and Bernal left for London, drifting eventually, almost reluctantly, into the Central School of Speech and Drama.
He describes his London years, living in a Finsbury Park flat and working as a barman in Islington’s Cuba Libre, as “life forming”. But he continued to see acting merely as “an odd-job profession” right until his second year at Central in 1999, when the Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu tracked him down and offered him a starring role as the love-struck owner of a formidable rottweiler, in the explosive ensemble piece Amores Perros.
That movie altered everything, for Bernal’s career and life, and for the very landscape of contemporary cinema. It became the spearhead of a new film-making movement called the Buena Onda (literally the Good Vibe, but understood as the Latin American New Wave), one that would pioneer stylistically propulsive yet socially aware film-making, would eventually include movies as diverse as Y Tu Mamá También, City of God and Pan’s Labyrinth and would feature Bernal as its poster boy — someone who had crossover appeal, but without the craven desire to “go Hollywood” as other Latin stars had done before him.
He says that the leaders of the Buena Onda, including himself, Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo Del Toro (the directors’ production company, the Tequila Gang, is synonymous with it), are reluctant to see themselves as a movement. “We are aware that we had better not structuralise what’s happening,” he explains. “It’s a very Latin American temptation to say that we are this generation, and whoever wasn’t born to this generation doesn’t exist to us. Whereas what’s happening is free and open to everyone and getting inspiration from all over the world.”
He also views his progress as an increasingly powerful Hollywood player with some scepticism. Of the reports that, unhappy with his “lust object” status, he clashed repeatedly with Pedro Almodóvar on the set of the latter’s Bad Education, he says, “It was a normal level of creative conflict that happens on every single film, but it was made into something bigger. He’s a director who tells you what to do, and you end up doing it.” And of his rumoured starring role in Martin Scorsese’s new big budget epic, Silence, about Roman Catholic missionaries in 17th-century Japan and co-starring Daniel Day-Lewis, he simply answers with a reticent tease: “Yes, I’ve heard about it, and I hope I’m doing it. But really, you know as much about it as I do.”
Currently based in Mexico City and Madrid, where his partner, the Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi lives with their new baby, Lazaro (sleeping through the night already, on only two evening feeds!), he tries to imagine the future in front of him. He launches into classic Bernal metaphor speak: “It’s a big road,” he says, eyes again half-closed in concentration. “And it’s always been unknown, right now even more unknown than before. And there’s a long way to go. And who knows where it will take me?” He stops, opens his eyes and, perhaps sensing that he hasn’t quite nailed it, adds the wonderfully direct, “I just want to give everything my best shot while I still don’t hate it.”
