Cruz, Bardem team up again for film about Pablo Escobar
OSCAR-winning Spanish actors Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem will begin shooting a movie about Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar next month, the married couple’s fi rst fi lm together since 2008. “Escobar”, a SpanishBulgarian joint project to be fi lmed in Colombia, will go into production on Oct 24 with Bardem playing Escobar and Cruz playing his lover, journalist Virginia Vallejo, producers said on Tuesday in a statement. “This is not a biopic, not just the story of a tough gangster. This is the story of the man who changed the history of crime in the last decades of the 20th century,” the fi lm’s producer, Miguel Menendez de Zubillaga, said in the statement. Husband and wife off screen, the last time the two appeared together in a movie was in the 2008 Woody Allen romantic comedy “Vicky Cristina Barcelona”. Cruz won a supporting-actress Oscar for her role.
Bardem won a supportingactor Oscar for the 2007 crime thriller “No Country for Old Men”.
“Escobar” will be directed by Spain’s Fernando Leon de Aranoa whose credits include the 2002 fi lm “Mondays in the Sun” also starring Bardem, for which both got Spain’s Oscarequivalent Goya for best director and best actor.
Escobar was the boss of one of the world’s most powerful criminal organisations and Colombia’s most-wanted fugitive.
The Colombian farmer’s son who became the world’s seventhrichest man with his ruthless dominance of the global cocaine trade was hunted for years before police killed him in his hometown of Medellin in 1993.
Over the years, thousands of people were killed in violence unleashed by his Medellin cartel.
He has recently inspired several fi lms and series including “Narcos,” a hit on Netfl ix which is in its second season. — AFP