12 ★ FTWeekend 17 August/18 August 2019The skin he lives in
Antonio Banderas|The Spanish
actor talks toRaphael Abrahamabout
the challenges of his new film, leaving
Hollywood and facing mortality
I
t’s no exaggeration to say that
Antonio Banderas has spent 37
years preparing for his latest role.
InPain and Glorythe Spanish actor
plays Salvador Mallo, a thinly
veiled facsimile of his close friend and
longtime collaborator, director Pedro
Almodóvar, with whom he first worked
on 1982’sLabyrinth of Passion. It’s a
remarkably honest and at times unflat-
tering self-portrait by Almodóvar, led
by arguably the best performance of
Banderas’s career, winning him a
shower of critical praise and the Best
Actor award in Cannes in May.
But in some ways Banderas’s prepara-
tion went deeper still — albeit un-
wittingly. The saturnine character of
Salva is determined to a large degree by
the litany of ailments from which he
suffers (many of them shared by
Almodóvar), and Banderas, though in
enviable shape for a man of 59, is him-
self now no stranger to health scares,
having suffered a heart attack in 2017.
When we meet in a central London
hotel he is candid about its impact but
his often excitable, rapid-fire speech
softens and slows to a gentle purr:
“There was something that has stayed
after the heart attack that I didn’t have
before,” he says. “And we actors, we are
animals, and so we use everything.
Some of the heart is there in that film.”
That “something” was clearly appar-
ent to Almodóvar, who sought out Ban-
deras for the role even though their
most recent major collaboration, 2011’s
The Skin I Live In, had been a bumpy one.
At that time the actor had come over
from Hollywood, flush from box office
successes such asDesperadoandThe
Mask of Zorroand eager to show off the
tricks he had picked up since their pre-
vious film together(Tie Me Up! Tie Me
Down!) 22 years earlier.
“Let me show you the things I have
learnt,” he told Almodóvar. “This is how
I modulate my voice now. This is how I
am way more relaxed in front of a cam-
era.” But the director was less than
impressed. “He said to me: ‘I cannot use
this. Where are you?’ I told him: ‘This is
my new me!’ So we did the shoot and
there was a constant tension.”
The film was a success but still the call
to makePain and Glorycame as a sur-
prise. “I never thought, especially after
that, that he was going to call me to play
him — but it happened. He said to me:
‘There is something different in you
since you had that cardiac episode, and I
don’t want you to hide it. Because I
know you, Antonio, and your normal
tendency is going to be to show people
that you are fine, that you are very ath-
letic and ‘I’m back!’ Don’t hide it.’”
But Banderas knew that this time he
would have to leave his ego at the door.
“I said: ‘Listen, I am just going to go to
zero. I’ll imagine that I never did a
movie, I never worked with you.’”
Playing your director, especially
mimicking his mannerisms warts and
all, may sound like a risky business. But
Almodóvar has been the first to praise
Banderas’s performance, calling itAt a time when rightwing populists
in Spain (and elsewhere) are invoking
the idea of a return to the glorious
past, does Banderas perhaps seenostal-
gia as a good thing or, like heroin, a dan-
gerous habit?
“It’s both,” he says. “There is a certain
amount of xenophobia that is a natural
fear of the unknown. What is going to
happen to us? There is a little bit of fear
of the loss of identity. You feel secure in
your tribe, but if you think that your
tribe is not there any more, then it starts
being blurry. Who are we? Are we who
we were? So all of those questions come
to a nation as they come to a person.”
Banderas himself has been goingthrough a period of reflection and let-
ting go of the past. The “new era” that
Almodóvar refers to did not dawn over-
night; it is the culmination of several
years of life changes.
In 2014 he split from his wife of 18
years, Melanie Griffith, with whom he
has a daughter, and in 2015 he moved
away from Hollywood.
Born in Malaga, and having forged
his career in Madrid and Los Angeles,
the Spanish superstar has made an
unlikely home in the London commuter
belt village of Cobham in Surrey with his
Dutch girlfriend.
He saysthat Hollywood had left him
“tired” and “angry”, frustrated by the
lack of options in a business that often
typecast him as the smooth Latin lover.
“I have been upset as a professional,
maybe because I was working in a place
where I was handicapped and I didn’t
have access to all of the characters
because of my accent, because of my
Latino condition... My way to revenge
was to say: ‘OK, I will do anything and
I’m going to make a lot of money.’ And
when [the heart attack] happened, I
thought: what am I doing? I have to
really do the things that I love, the things
that mean something to me as an actor.
Picasso came like that.”
Banderas is referring toGenius,a
National Geographic series in which he
starred last year as the artist (and his
fellowmalagueño). I suggest that if there
is one thing that seems to connect thecharacters of Salva and Picasso it is their
stubbornness and the unshakeability of
their artistic vision.
Banderas agrees. “He has a lot of
Picasso, Pedro. But I don’t think that
Pedro has left behind so much collateral
damage. Picasso left a lot and was proba-
bly not conscious of it, but he was
unbelievably sincere.We are not sin-
cere. We all try to make ourselves up
and sometimes for good reasons. You
don’t want to damage other people, so
you swallow things. Picasso wasn’t like
that.. .He was: I love you, I love you, I
don’t love you, out of my life, moving on.
It’s like a bulldozer.”
If there is one disappointment in
Pain and Gloryit is that although this is
Banderas’s first starring role alongside
Penélope Cruz, they have no scenes
together. Instead, she plays his mother
in flashbacks. Will we ever see them on
screen together?
“We both are saying: ‘Pedro, you have
to write something for us.’ And he
always says: ‘Yes, well, hmm, OK.’ But
he’s got to have the impulse. Pedro is not
a person that you can push into an idea.
He has ideas freely and he has to do what
comes to him.”
What’s coming to Banderas are offers
of more substantial, varied roles and
awards recognition. Having been nomi-
nated for an Emmy and a Golden Globe
forGeniuslast year, and winning the
Cannes prize forPain and Glory, could he
this year get his first shot at an Oscar?
“I don’t know. I don’t even want to
think about it,” he says, “because expec-
tation is the mother of all frustrations.
It’s better just to enjoy what we have.”‘Pain and Glory’ is released in UK on
August 23, and in the US on October 4.
‘Genius’ is available on Amazon PrimeMain: Banderas
photographed
for the FT by
Gabby LaurentTop, from left:
as Pablo Picasso
in ‘Genius’; with
Elena Anaya in
‘The Skin I Live
In’; with Asier
Etxeandia and
Almodóvar on
the set of ‘Pain
and Glory’;
Penélope Cruz
in the film— Alamy‘When [the heart attack]
happened, I thought:
What am I doing? I have todo the things that I love’
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didn’t say. I’ve known him for almost 40
years, but our relationship has been lim-
ited because Pedro is a very private per-
son. So when I received this script, it sur-
prised me. There were things there that
I didn’t know about my friend.”
Pain and Gloryis above all a film about
re-engaging with the past and, as
Banderas puts, it, “reconciliation, ask-
ing for forgiveness, second chances”.
There is also an element of nostalgia as
Salva (with the help of heroin) conjures
up vivid memories from his childhood
that are tinged with longing even though
they are filled with poverty and the all-
powerful presence of the church during
the oppressive Franco years.“his rebirth as an actor and the start of a
new era... The character is the oppo-
site to the bravura of the characters
he has played to date. Profound,
subtle, with a very varied gallery of
minute gestures, he has pulled off a very
difficult character.”
The film was difficult, too, for
Almodóvar, who, through Salva, was
attempting to confront and resolve
painful issues — in particular the rela-
tionship with his late mother. “I knew
that for Pedro it was almost like a ther-
apy,” says Banderas. “I could see him
getting more and more relieved as the
movie was going on because he was say-
ing the things that for many years he
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