Antonio Banderas had a heart attack – and a change of heart
The Spanish actor is not shy about winning awards, but a close shave with mortality has refocused his energy on roles that really matter to him.
Antonio Banderas is full of life. Even the Spanish actor’s 2017 heart attack couldn’t stop him. In fact it fed his portrayal as an ailing director in Pedro Almodovar’s Pain and Glory, a character loosely based on his old friend and director on eight movies. Banderas won the 2019 Cannes Festival acting prize for his performance as well as the European Film award for best actor, and he was nominated for an Oscar for the first time.
This might seem surprising given his performances in Almodovar’s films including Laws of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown, Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and The Skin I Live In. Awards probably evaded him as he largely pursued a commercial route in his career.
Banderas first gained attention in the US in The Mambo Kings and Interview with the Vampire, while his athletic, sexy portrayal as a deadly mariachi in Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado led to the hugely successful The Mask of Zorro, which turned the dashing actor into a heartthrob. The late master swordsman, Bob Anderson, who had worked on several Star Wars and 007 movies, once said Banderas was the best and most natural swordsman he’d worked with.
A prodigious talent, Banderas brought his singing and dancing skills to the Broadway musical hit Nine and he was nominated for a Tony award, though he failed to be cast in the 2009 movie version, possibly, he says, because he left the production after nine months, before the end of its run. After the charismatic actor voiced Puss in Boots in Shrek 2 and Shrek the Third, the character proved so popular he was given his own animated movie, which became a huge hit and was nominated for an Academy Award. A long-awaited sequel, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, comes out at Christmas – just in time for Oscar consideration.
There’s no doubt Banderas paved the way for Hispanic actors in Hollywood, even if he watched his compatriots, Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem, score Oscar nominations before him. “I’m going to be very sincere with you, I loved winning for best actor at the Cannes Film Festival,” Banderas 61, announces in his forthright, fast-speaking manner. “It’s a festival where I had movies a number of times and suddenly to receive an award was very, very special.”
Funnily enough, we are meeting to discuss his new comedy, Official Competition, where at the end he stands on the Cannes Palais steps at the premiere of a new movie by Cruz’s Lola Cuevas, a wilful independent director with unique work methods. The story centres on the production of the film where Banderas plays arrogant Hollywood heartthrob Felix Rivero, who must share the billing with a prestigious theatre actor, Ivan Torres (Oscar Martinez), and he is far from keen.
Official Competition was shot on the outskirts of Madrid by the Argentinian directing duo, Gaston Duprat and Mariano Cohn, who had previously enjoyed success with another comedy, 2016’s The Distinguished Citizen, also starring Argentinian actor Martinez. Official Competition premiered in Venice to uproarious approval.
“When I was watching the movie with the audience I realised that my last two movies are talking about cinema,” Banderas explained after the premiere. “In Pain and Glory I’m playing a director in a more solemn Almodovar movie, and now I am playing an actor in a completely different style.”
He said he liked the possibilities of playing characters that are so different – it is more satisfying than winning acting awards.
“Landing some of the jokes and making people laugh – but not only laugh – was rewarding,” he said. “The movie has depth charges and something explodes a little bit later. I understand that some people may be upset about it, because they must see themselves. But the movie is not only about actors; it’s about human behaviour. It’s about vulnerable people fighting in a jungle in which they have to survive with all the tricks of the game.”
Does he recognise himself in the conniving, rich and famous actor he plays?
“It’s really difficult, especially when you’re very young and success comes to you. Suddenly you have access to many things that you didn’t have before and you have to control that. It’s very difficult to know if you’re getting those things because of yourself or because of what you represent.”
He says being a celebrity distorts normal life and relationships, which can be dangerous. Banderas has been guarded about the trappings of fame and admits he has relied on his loved ones to help him navigate through it. He says it has helped that his love life has been “constant”, starting with his marriage of eight years to Spanish actor Ana Leza and his 20-year marriage to Melanie Griffith, with whom he would have his only biological child, daughter Stella, while also helping raise Griffith’s daughter, Dakota Johnson (with Don Johnson), and son Alexander (with Steven Bauer) as their stepfather. Since his split from Griffith he has been in a relationship with Dutch financial consultant Nicole Kimpel, 20 years his junior.
“I am constantly in touch with Melanie, because even if we are no longer married, she’s my best friend,” Banderas confides. “We talk a lot on the phone. She’s family. She’s the mother of my baby and she’s the mother of two other fabulous children. Dakota was here two days ago, and the first thing I received when I got to Venice was a call from her. ‘Hey Papi, I am at another hotel so come and see me!’ So we still have that relationship and it’s true. The relationship that I have now is true.”
In an emotional speech at the 2019 Hollywood Film Awards where Banderas was honoured, Johnson thanked her Papi. “When I was six years old, my mother married a man who brought an unbelievably bright light, a whole new world of creativity and culture and one remarkably magical little sister into our family … Antonio taught me about true passion and discipline. He would spend hours, and days even, in his office trying to get to the nucleus of something he had become interested in, or a role he was preparing.”
Born in Malaga to a policeman father and a teacher mother, Banderas in his youth harboured dreams of a career as a professional footballer. “I was very good,” he notes unabashedly. “But then I broke my left foot, right on the eve of Franco’s death. He died just as my football career was over, but the life of the country changed and my life turned around.”
He’d fallen in love with acting when his parents had taken him to the theatre as a kid. “I loved the ritual and watching all the actors. They were playing this game like kids and it was wonderful. I wondered how I could do that, because my parents did not come from that world.” When he was 13 he started at drama school in Malaga. His movie career began when he met Almodovar as he was performing in his first play at the National Theatre in Madrid.
“We were outside at a very famous coffee shop when this guy came up to us with a red briefcase, sat down and started talking. He knew some of the people I was with and was very funny. Everyone was laughing at him. I had long hair and a moustache and looked like Cyrano de Bergerac, and as he was leaving he looked at me he said, ‘You have a romantic face, you should do movies’. I said, ‘Sure’. My friends told me his name and that he had just made a movie, ‘but it’s not going to be very big’. Those guys were so right, eh?” he muses.
Banderas first appeared in Almodovar’s 1982 Labyrinth of Passion, and in four successive movies the pair became trailblazers in the post-Franco era, shocking the world with their frankness and lustiness in Matador and Law of Desire, and achieving fame with Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! “You could never make that film today,” he chuckles of the latter. “Nowadays, if you made a movie about a man who tied a woman to a bed you’d go to jail. But at the time it was a brilliant reflection on relationships.”
Interestingly, Banderas has rarely worked with Cruz, Almodovar’s other muse. They had one scene together in the director’s I’m So Excited! while they appeared separately in a scene in Pain and Glory where Cruz played his mother. Official Competition marks their first time starring together after they made a proposal to the directors to work on a film.
“I first met Penelope in New York when I was shooting Philadelphia,” Banderas recalls. “She was 18 at the time and was going out with a Spanish rock star who was living in New York. We’ve been friends ever since. When she came to Los Angeles I was already established there. I opened the door of my house to all the Spanish people who came over and Penelope and Melanie got along very, very well from the beginning. She used to visit often.”
He is surprised this is the first time they have worked together.
He recognises he was lucky to survive his heart attack and attributes Kimpel for saving his life by giving him strong aspirin. “You feel that the life is escaping out of your body, you say, ‘Oh my God, this is it’.”
He then had three stents implanted – and re-evaluated his life.
“The new cars I wanted to buy no longer mattered. I don’t need them. I came to understand what is important. My daughter is important. My friends are important and my job to act and tell stories is important.”
Suddenly he was offered a slew of meaty roles after a career lull. “I don’t know if there was something in my aura, but good things started happening. Ron Howard called me asking me if I wanted to play Picasso and then Pedro and Steven Soderbergh called.”
Banderas received critical praise for his portrayal as Pablo Picasso in the second season of TV series Genius, he reteamed with his Haywire director Soderbergh on The Laundromat, a satire about the Panama Papers, he appeared as a cool pirate alongside Robert Downey Jr in fantasy adventure film Dolittle, and played villains in The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard and box office hit Uncharted. Next year he will be seen alongside Harrison Ford in the fifth Indiana Jones film in an undisclosed role.
“It was really nice to be around Harrison (Ford) and Phoebe Waller-Bridge,” he told the Los Angeles Times. “I’m not the bad guy,” he added. “I’m a friend of Indy’s.”
In 2015 Banderas moved away from Hollywood and until recently lived in rural Surrey, outside London. A theatre actor at heart, he has moved back to Malaga, where he has established a theatre company and bought a theatre.
“I found a way to financially ruin myself, so if you see me doing bad movies it’s because I need to pay for it or they might throw me out of my house!” he chuckles. “But it’s not a laughing matter to me anymore. I’ve done it in a very altruistic way. I don’t want any money from the theatre. It’s something for my town and I’d been wanting to do it for a long time.”
In an earlier interview, for Pain and Glory, I’d suggested the film’s title would be a good name for an autobiography, which in a sense it was for Almodovar. When I asked the title for his own, the ever-playful Banderas immediately replied: “Puss in Boots”.
Maybe Banderas has nine lives after all. He certainly is living this one to the full.
Official Competition releases in cinemas on July 21.
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