FROM PAIN TO GLORY
Antonio Banderas reveals some new truths
IT WAS ALMODÓVAR WHO GAVE BANDERAS HIS FIRST FILM ROLE, AS A GAY ISLAMIC TERRORIST IN LABYRINTH OF PASSION
It took a heart attack to prepare Antonio Banderas for his role in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain And Glory. The lessons of that episode weren’t lost, though, and his performance in the Spanish-language film earned him the Best Actor award at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival.
Nominated for International Feature Film for the 92nd Academy Awards which was held earlier this month, Pain And Glory, now in Thai cinemas, is the seventh collaboration between the Spanish actor and the Spanish director. Banderas was also nominated for Actor in a Leading Role for the Oscars 2020 — his first Academy Award nomination. In fact, it was Almodóvar who gave Banderas his first film role, as a gay Islamic terrorist in Labyrinth
Of Passion (1982).
Despite having been friends for four decades, however, the two hadn’t collaborated in years. Nonetheless, the script immediately caught Banderas’ attention.
“When I read the script, I was quite surprised,” he recalled. “Pedro is a very private person, and I always respected his privacy. There were aspects of him that I didn’t know, especially issues relating to his family, to his mother, to lovers and to us, actors.” At first Banderas was confused.
“Is this a real biography of Pedro, even though it’s not factual? Everything concerning the state of his health is very real,” the actor said. “He has been having a lot of medical problems, but certain aspects were fictional.”
Banderas’ character, Salvador Mallo, is a film director who’s too ill to work. He spends his days examining his past, trying to figure out what went wrong and worrying that it may be too late to fix it.
Meanwhile Banderas himself was dealing with the ramifications of his 2017 heart attack. Among them was that he felt psychologically ready to immerse himself in the story.
“At this time in my life,” he said, “a number of things had happened that changed my life for good. When you see the truth — and the truth is called death — and it’s very close to you, only the important things flourish, and everything not important disappears.”
The most noteworthy of those things that happened would be, of course, Banderas’ health scare.
“My heart attack was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “I was in London, in my house, and the good luck that I had was unbelievable.
“The night before I had this event, my girlfriend [Dutch investment consultant Nicole Kempel], who suffers from migraines, ran out of paracetamol,” Banderas explained. “The pharmacy was closed, so she went to another store. There were no paracetamol, so she bought a bottle of 500mg aspirin — the biggest dosage on the market.”
She almost didn’t bring it home, he added.
“When she was paying, the cashier noticed she dropped something,” Banderas said. “It was the aspirin. She picked it up and put it in the bag.
“The next morning I started feeling weird,” the actor continued. “I told her, ‘I think I’m having a heart attack’. She put one of those aspirins under my tongue and called an ambulance.
“One of the doctors said that aspirin was very important to my recovery,” he said. “It made my blood thinner almost immediately, and I didn’t have damage to my heart.”
“You know,” Banderas concluded, “it depends on where you are and who is with you — the coincidences of life and how things come together and how vulnerable we are. This really had an impact on me. There are things I’ve always wanted to do, and now I’m doing them.”
On his list was working again with Almodóvar. Although they had made six films together, five of them dated from 30 years ago or more: Labyrinth Of Passion, Matador (1986), Law Of Desire (1987), Women On The Verge Of A Nervous Breakdown (1988) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989).
As for the sixth, The Skin I Live In (2011), its shoot was marked by tension between the two — tension that Banderas later regretted.
“When Pedro called me, nine years ago, we had dinner and I talked about my 22 years of American adventures in different genres,” he said. “I put it on top of the table at rehearsals, and after several days Pedro said, ‘You know, Antonio, I’m sorry, but I can’t use all these experiences that you had. Maybe they’re useful for American directors you’re working with, but not for me. Where are you?.’”
Banderas laughed.
“It’s not that Pedro was cocky,” he said. “But I was very proud of certain advances I’d made. I confronted him in a good way, because we are friends, but the shooting was kind of tense.”
“Then I saw the movie with an audience for the first time,” Banderas said, “and I was very surprised at the capacity my dear friend had to bring out a character in me that I didn’t know I had.
“I decided I’d love to have another opportunity to actually show him I was going to open my ears and eyes and listen very carefully.”
When they began filming Pain And Glory, Almodóvar was quick to notice how Banderas had changed.
“Pedro said, ‘There is something different in you since you had this cardiac event that’s very interesting. I don’t want you to hide it. I want you to show it, if it’s OK with you,’” the actor recalled. “It was OK, and I just did it. We collaborated to create this character.”
“Everybody has circles in their lives that have been left open,” Banderas said. “They have to come to terms with some other people. We all want to ask for forgiveness sometimes.”
“Pain And Glory actually was a beautiful adventure, fortunately with one of my best friends,” he concluded. “I owe him a lot.”
When the two first met, in 1980, Banderas was working at the Spanish National Theatre in Madrid. He was at a nearby cafe, having coffee with some other cast members, when Almodóvar showed up.
“He just talked and talked,” Banderas said. “Then he looked at me and said, ‘You should do movies. You have a very romantic face.’”
Hollywood agreed. Madonna introduced the then-31-year-old actor in her documentary Madonna: Truth Or Dare
(1991), and the following year he made his American feature debut as a struggling musician in Mambo Kings (1992). He played the lover of an Aids patient (Tom Hanks) in Philadelphia (1993), and a vampire in Interview With The Vampire (1994), which starred Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.
Settling into life in Los Angeles, Banderas married Melanie Griffith in 1996. They have a daughter, 23-year-old Stella Banderas, but divorced in 2015. Banderas relocated to England. “Hollywood is no longer a place,” he said. “It’s a brand. If you’re branded as Hollywood, it doesn’t matter where you work.”
Certainly his relocation hasn’t cost him work.
“In a way I’ve become more selective with what is coming from Hollywood,” Banderas said, “but I didn’t abandon it. My family is still there. My daughter is finishing her studies at college there. My ex-wife, who is probably my best friend, is there. My stepdaughter Dakota [Johnson], who will be at the film festival, is there.”
“Los Angeles is still alive for me,” he said. “It’s not just a bunch of houses. I have people there I love.”
Then there are his commitments in Spain, notably in Malaga, where Banderas grew up as the son of a policeman and a teacher.
“I bought a theatre in Malaga,” he said. “I’m putting a lot of time and energy and funds into it.”
He also wants to make a movie with Penelope Cruz, with whom he has worked only once, briefly, in I’m So Excited! (2013). In Pain And Glory they play mother and son, but have no scenes together.
“I’m going to be 60 next year,” Banderas said. “I look back and am amazed that I’ve been in so many places and have met so many people. But in reality I live very much in the present and the future. That excites me.”
“If I live for another 20 years, I want to stay passionate about my work,” he continued. “If I see a stage, I shiver. I smell it. I love it. Going in front of the camera — I love it. I want to tell stories, and I will never stop.”
“I don’t regret anything,” Banderas concluded. “I’m very content where I am now. If I change anything in my past, I may not be here.”