For Banderas, career now a blank canvas
Spanish actor casts aside his reputation as Latino heartthrob to portray the ‘reserved’ artist Picasso
Genius Debuts Tuesday, National Geographic Canada
Something interesting is going on with Antonio Banderas. Formerly one half of one of Hollywood’s strongest marriages, the Spanish actor split from Melanie Griffith three years ago. Since then he has left Beverly Hills, relocated to the stockbroker belt of Surrey in the United Kingdom and shed his Hollywood image.
Instead of playing Latino heartthrobs, voicing characters like Puss in Boots in the Shrek films or starring in action films such as The Expendables 3, he has taken roles in several Spanish-language or Hispanic-themed films — parts that seem to hearken back to his pre-Hollywood days, when he became a muse to art-house director Pedro Almodovar in Madrid.
“I was detaching myself from a character I had created that was not me,” he has said of this recent shift.
Now the 57-year-old is tackling one of the meatiest roles of his career as Pablo Picasso in the second season of National Geographic’s acclaimed Genius series, the first of which focused on Albert Einstein.
He portrays Picasso from his 40s to his death at age 91 in 1973, during which time he was exiled from Spain and painted his masterpiece Guernica.
The show debuts Tuesday on National Geographic Canada before moving to its regular Sunday time slot on April 29.
Playing the towering artist brings, Banderas says, “excitement mixed with responsibility,” not least since both men are natives of Malaga.
“I was born two blocks from where Picasso was born and when my mom was taking me to school, we always saw the plaque saying he was born in this house,” Banderas says. “We were living under a fascist dictatorship and didn’t have too many heroes, so he became a huge figure for me very early in my life.”
Although Banderas travels constantly, since his divorce his main residence is in Cobham, on the outskirts of London, where he lives in a modernist house with his new girlfriend Nicole Kimpel, a 37-year-old Dutch investment banker.
“I live in the countryside because I can ride there. I do my own things and I am not bothered by anybody except foxes,” he says.
Three years ago he enrolled in a fashion design course, presumably to hone his menswear line (he already successfully flogs his own accessories and scent lines), which he launched a couple of years ago.
Did his newly acquired skills help his portrayal of Picasso?
“I tried to recreate three or four of his paintings to prepare. Not because I wanted to become a painter, but to get familiar with the tools I would use filming.”
He also read widely about the artist. “He’s not an easy character, there are a number of mysteries attached to his life. There are as many Picassos as there are people talking about him. It depends how their life with Picasso was, you have one Picasso or another. He was much more reserved than other artists like Dali, who were very out there, so you have to read between the lines.”
After #MeToo, one challenge has been how to portray Picasso’s Lothario reputation. The artist had affairs with scores of women. Two of his lovers killed themselves, while two went mad. “Women are machines for suffering,” Picasso told one mistress, adding: “For me there are only two kinds of women: Goddesses and doormats.”
Yet Banderas refuses to buy into a simplistic reading of Picasso as a misogynist. “I don’t know if he treated women badly or people in general or if he was misinterpreted in central moments of his life. With many of the women that talk badly about Picasso, the relationship didn’t work in the way they probably thought it would — so that’s kind of normal.
“What I discovered about Picasso was that he was tremendously honest and sincere when he talked and that can be painful. There were some relationships that were not pleasant, but it is not recorded that he had any physical violence against women.”
Last year, Banderas expressed his support for his friend Salma Hayek after she claimed to have been harassed by disgraced mogul Harvey Weinstein. Now, however, Banderas won’t discuss either the Weinstein affair or the historic abuse allegations that have since surfaced concerning director Woody Allen, with whom he worked on the film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger.
“These cases belong to a pattern of behaviour which has been carried out for millennia,” he says firmly. “But I wouldn’t like to be very specific about specific people. I think that’s unfair because I don’t have all the data.”
His refusal to join the swell of voices denouncing “inappropriate” behaviour stems from growing up under a fascist dictatorship, which many outsiders assumed all Spaniards supported. “People saying, ‘This person is guilty of this,’ is against my principles,” Banderas says. “I was born in a country in which you were guilty from the moment you were born just for being part of that country.
“When (Francisco) Franco died, I was doing theatre and I remember running in front of the police and fighting for our first democratic government to prove the fact that we were innocent until proven guilty.
“So I don’t want to make that mistake, I don’t want to point a finger. I pay my taxes to have judges and policemen put the facts together and make a decision.”