Gael Garcia Bernal talks about ‘Cassandro’ and the lack of Mexican American films in Hollywood

Gael García Bernal still remembers the wave of electricity he felt while filming “Y Tu Mamá También” more than 20 years ago. “This was it,” García Bernal said, standing alongside his friend and co-star Diego Luna. In front of the cameras and the crew, they looked at each other and knew: “This was it.” “This was the point of no return.”

Call it hopeful naivety, call it instinct, or call it a kind of inheritance, but the two young actors, then only 19 and 20 years old, were right. Both were on the brink, on the verge of international stardom.

Now, it’s a balmy, sunny afternoon in early January — the height of awards season — and García Bernal has just returned to Los Angeles when we meet at the London Hotel in West Hollywood. Aside from the salt-and-pepper streaks in his hair, the 45-year-old actor retained the same boyish charm and mischievous sparkle in his hazel eyes that made him stand out all those years ago.

Born in Guadalajara, García Bernal came of age in Mexico City’s theater community. His parents, both actors, worked in television, but it was experimental theater that really attracted them, he says. It was in that environment that he met Luna, whose parents were family friends.

“It was a really nice upbringing,” he said. While he technically made his acting debut when he was one year old, and starred in television series throughout his adolescence, he spent much of his youth resisting the urge to pursue it more seriously.

“Why? He laughed because he was there. He wanted to do something completely his own, and the film became exactly what he was looking for.”

Since his debut in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, García Bernal has worked by instinct, seeking out roles that have earned him acclaim in his native Mexico, as well as abroad, with an Ariel Award, a Golden Globe Award and two BAFTA nominations. Under his belt.

In his latest film, “Amazon Studios”Cassandro“, He is a hurricane of charisma, lighting up the screen as Saúl Armendáriz, a true wrestler. Who turned lucha libre into Cassandro – the sport The first openly gay queer person.

Although he now jokes that as a Mexican actor, playing a guerrilla was inevitable, he never thought much about the idea until director Roger Ross Williams sought him out. García Bernal was interested. He grew up loving lucha libre, but the script wasn’t completed. As time went on, the project became more and more real, as did the idea of ​​becoming Cassandro.

“He’s not just an ordinary wrestler,” he said. “It’s campy and full of life. It’s pure exuberance.”

In the ring, outfitted in shiny spandex units, García Bernal is electric. Outside the ring, it’s impossible to look away from him, even as he wrestles with the pain of the men who left him because he wouldn’t live life quietly. It’s a career-best and relentlessly exhilarating performance – something that was crucial for García Bernal and Ross Williams.

“It would be easy to say that Saul invented Cassandro in order to find himself,” he said. “But he came with Cassandro to confront his father’s myths. Without knowing it, that’s what he was doing, and that’s what freed him.”

Produced in part by La Corriente del Golfo, the production company that García Bernal co-founded with Luna, the film speaks directly to their goals of creating art that transcends boundaries. The duo, along with their contemporaries and frequent collaborators, Mexican directors Iñárritu and Alfonso Cuaron, occupy a strange place in Hollywood.

They have made commercial blockbusters and independent films, winning critical acclaim at home and in America, and as they move between these fields, they notice some distinct differences.

In Mexico, García Bernal says, films can be indirect, they can embrace ambiguity and contradiction without feeling obligated to explain them. In Hollywood things are different. Here, the films focus more on clear narratives, ones that draw sharp lines between point A and point B.

Another stark difference, which he hopes will begin to change, is the lack of Mexican American films. A few years ago, when he was on the jury at Sundance, he remembers being struck by the fact that there wasn’t a single Mexican American or Latin American filmmaker in the lineup.

In hindsight, he had a hypothesis about why: “It’s because they’re so well behaved.” He’s partly joking, but there’s truth to it too.

Even as a Mexican actor, American interviewers have asked him to answer questions about the country’s anti-immigrant policies, or about racist statements from American politicians. “It is very unfair and ridiculous to fall into this narrative,” he said. “That’s the most toxic thing you can ever do, is defending what you’re not all the time.”

He wants Mexicans and Mexican Americans to embrace each other, push each other and achieve great things. But he is sympathetic to the different problems each of them faces.

“Since I was a little kid in America, I’ve been brought up in this kind of scary system of, ‘If you do this, your future could be at stake,'” he said. “But to make good films, you have to take risks, you have to say things that people don’t want to do.” “For anyone to hear it, you’ve got to behave badly, and I’m calling on Mexican Americans to behave badly because we have a lot to learn from each other.”

The actor explains that when he was younger, he struck up a friendship with famous Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes. “It’s strange, isn’t it? “To think of an older person, or an intellectual befriending a young actor,” he said. “But he became a kind of mentor.”

When they got together to talk about the state of things, the actor recalls that Fuentes was always working his way back to one basic truth: “We have to make movies, we have to write books, Gael. If not, this whole country will collapse. The whole meaning collapses.” “For life. We have to keep going.”

For García Bernal, filmmaking should be vital. His filmography is filled with roles that sparked controversy and sparked discourse on a whole host of cultural norms and taboos from Masculinity to religionor Depiction of violence And Sex. When asked if that was intentional, or if he was always looking for projects that might upset the bear, he laughed.

“At a certain point, I think it was,” he added. “Films that deal with taboos can fail miserably, too. But cinema, like poetry, has a way of reaching places that ordinary speech doesn’t. However, it requires a lot of dedication and precision. It requires intention.”

Earlier this month, the actor A visit to the standard closet He caused a sensation when he picked up “Y Tu Mamá También” off the shelf and asked, “I want you to tell me what movie has gotten you excited in recent years?” Online commentators Clearly agree with the sentimentWhen asked about this, he objected a little at first.

“I was making a strong generalization,” he said. But after a few moments of searching his mind for potential contenders, he returned to his original assertion. “I can’t think of anyone since that has the same sexual complexity. It’s so open and free and fun. It’s sexy, but it’s deep (in) the way he challenges stereotypes and plays with them with humor.”

He thinks it’s partly the culture now, in reference to the debates we currently have about the legality of sex scenes or how sexuality is portrayed. He sees some of these motives as somewhat wise, but he admits that sex scenes can fall into the same trap of existing solely for the shock factor.

Either way, he said, what’s missing in cinema is not sex per se, but the seriousness of Y Tu Mamá, something that initially led Mexican critics to dismiss it as a superficial teen comedy.

“I like that history proved them wrong,” he said. “There is an innocence and openness, and Alfonso Cuarón handled it with a lot of tenderness.”

For many Latin Americans, the film is a gateway to Mexican and Latin American cinema – a gateway to a world that presents characters, stories and a full history that was, and still is, rarely seen in Hollywood. Throughout his career, it has been those roles, those roles that have stood the test of time, that have crossed boundaries, that have informed the way an actor views success.

For him, an Academy nomination would be “awesome,” because he knows that might be the reason someone learns about Mexican films, or jumps at the chance to have a story in Spanish. But at the same time, he’s not in this for recognition. Just hearing that someone has been moved by one of his films is more than enough.

“For me, it all makes sense,” he added. “Hearing that you made someone’s world bigger — that’s probably the most beautiful thing you can ever experience as an actor, but it’s also one of the most beautiful things you can do for someone.”

It’s something that only an actor well-versed in navigating between borders, between cultures, and between experiences could probably portray well.

“When language reaches its end, and our ideas about identity disappear,” he said. “Art transcends.”

Kat Cardenas is a Latina writer and photographer based in Austin. Her work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York Magazine, Harper’s Bazaar, GQ and other publications.