Gael García Bernal: Just Another Homeless Young Star
Article from the New York Times, 19 September 2004 (x)
By Ginger Thompson
MEXICO CITY - THE lunch rush has ended at a popular, upscale cafe, and one of the most attractive and acclaimed young movie actors in the world hobbles through the room of empty tables on crutches. He's so rumpled and heavily bundled up it looks as if he's spent the night on the street. Blushing and taking off his cap, he explains that he's just had hernia surgery. "I have been lifting heavy suitcases up and down a lot of stairs," he says. "I don't have my own place yet, so I stay with different friends." Unloading a big floppy satchel and laying his crutches on the floor, he shrugs, pulls off his jacket and takes a seat. Then, he makes eye contact. Gael García Bernal, it turns out, is a divine sight even in a post-operative state.
And if his life seems to be in a bit of disarray, his career is not. He's got two big films opening soon: The Motorcycle Diaries and Bad Education. Bad Education, which will be screened at the New York Film Festival on Oct. 9 and 10 before its commercial opening on Nov. 19, moved Mr. García into the coveted circle of Pedro Almodóvar (Mr. García had to learn to walk in high heels and wear mascara for his role as a drag queen). In Motorcycle Diaries, which arrives Friday, Mr. García plays the legendary revolutionary Che Guevara, who, as a young man on a long ride across South America, is awakened to the political injustices he fought to his death.
Mr. García isn't afraid of a fight. Unlike most young actors, he is driven by an agenda that goes beyond red carpets and glossy magazine covers: he has shown modern Mexico in all of its sometimes ugly, always complicated glory. The characters he has played cross lines, challenge taboos and reveal secrets, in a deeply Catholic country that prefers to keep public conversations polite. And his acting has helped bring international acclaim to films that are rescuing this country's stale movie industry.
At the same time, he's established himself well beyond the Mexican border, but he's not sure he wants to cross.
Hollywood can't get him to return calls. (He suggests they stop sending scripts with characters called, he says, "Chico From the Barrio.") He may be looking for his first grown-up apartment, but he's not going to be filling it with movie-star loot.
Mr. García blushes again. He explains that he's only 25, and he's been living a whirlwind. "I had a place when I was studying in London, but I couldn't pay for it, and so my solution was to stay with girlfriends," he says. "Then I began moving around so much I didn't need a place."
Those who know him say it's a rising star's way of keeping himself grounded, by not acquiring anything that cannot be stuffed into a backpack. Beyond Mr. García's smoldering good looks, there's a smart, well-read, cultured human being who rejects the superstar syndrome and has something to say. In a two-hour interview in Spanish, it becomes clear that roots mean more to Mr. García than roofs.
It's rainy season in Mexico City, and as the clouds roll in, the cafe turns dim. Mr. García's greenish-brownish-bluish eyes change with the light as he retraces his journey from Mexican soap operas to big, bold art films. He was born in Guadalajara, in the north of Mexico, and grew up here, where his parents worked as actors. Mr. García has said that he followed his parents into show business so that he could spend time with them. As a teenager, he got into the prestigious Central School of Speech and Drama in London. Then he came back to Mexico City and won the starring role in Amores Perros, by Alejandro González Iñárritu, the film that would return his country to prominence on the international cinema circuit.
Mr. García played a poor city kid who wants so desperately to escape his lot in life and run away with his brother's wife that he enters his Rottweiler in barbaric, back-alley dogfights for money. The movie, which was nominated for the best foreign film Oscar, revealed unsightly sides of Mexican life that hadn't been seen before on film. But it was Mr. García's next role, as a sensual young man in Alfonso Cuarón's Y Tu Mamá También, that won him fans.
Again, it was the story of a road trip, but it was also a love triangle and a coming-of-age narrative about two teenagers overwhelmed by their own hormones. Its sex scenes struck a chord with moviegoers around the world -- everywhere, that is, but here, where audiences were put off by Mr. Cuarón's frankness. "That is why Mexican films can be so dry," Mr. García said. "In this country, everyone wants prostitutes to be poets, young people to speak like philosophers. But that's not the way movies should be. That's not real."
Mr. García's next film led to national protests here. In The Crime of Father Amaro, directed by Carlos Carrera, he played a predator priest who has an affair with a teenager and sends her to her death in a clandestine abortion clinic. The Catholic church pressured the Mexican government to ban the film -- which might have worked as recently as a decade ago. But in 2000, Mexicans ousted the authoritarian regime that had controlled the government for most of the last century, and they are less willing to tolerate censorship. Protests against Father Amaro by religious groups succeeded only in drawing more people to theaters.
"For so long they told us we were not ready for democracy," Mr. García says, speaking about the government. "We were always ready. And that's what people said over and over again, when they went to see Father Amaro. A lot of people who saw it said they thought it was a bad movie, but they were glad a movie like that existed."
In a way, that seems to be the thinking that drives Mr. García's free-agent film career (despite enormous demand, he's made almost no commitments to future projects). He says he gravitates toward roles that challenge him and that tell untold stories, or those that have been forbidden. Take his two latest films. Che Guevara is right up there with the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X as one of the most widely recognized, least understood figures in the world. The goal of The Motorcycle Diaries, he said, was to demystify Che. "In the end," Mr. García says, "he comes down to the same common denominators we all share at 23. We have all traveled and discovered ourselves in new places."
Walter Salles directed Mr. García in the story of the cross-continental road trip through labor camps and a leper colony that slowly transformed a starry-eyed Argentine medical student named Ernesto Guevara into the fierce revolutionary called Che. In a telephone interview from San Francisco, Mr. Salles says Mr. García immediately felt an affinity with an image of Che few people would recognize -- and some might not like. Mr. Salles's Che is not the lion depicted on posters and T-shirts. He's naïve, sickly, socially awkward and so painfully uncertain of himself that he's overshadowed by his dashing travel companion, Alberto Granado (played by Rodrigo de la Serna).
"It takes courage for an actor to portray an Ernesto Guevara who is introspective, who is living with his doubts, not with certitudes," Mr. Salles says. "This is the story of a young man who rebaptizes himself from the beginning to the end of a journey. At the beginning he is one man. At the end he is another. Gael had the capacity to understand the dimension of that arc." Mr. Salles continues: "He moves us in gentle strokes. In the end it's like walking two hours in the gentle rain. You're soaking wet, but you don't really know why."
Mr. García dropped everything to do Bad Education, he says, because of the "illusion of working with Almodóvar." There were lots of rumors about bitter disagreements between the actor and Mr. Almodóvar during the making of the film, in which Mr. García plays a drag queen who was abused by a priest as a boy. Some reports said that Mr. Almodóvar stopped filming at one point and demanded that Mr. García lose weight for the role.
Mr. García is discreet, but clearly, making the film was a trying experience. Colonial attitudes toward Mexico remain alive and well in Spain, he says. "When I arrived there to prepare for the movie, many people told me to take off my accent," he recalls. "Everyone said the same thing to me, I swear -- even journalists and Almodóvar, himself. They would tell me to take off my accent, like it was something dirty I had to clean up. I told them, 'What do you mean, take off my accent?' I told them I was going to put on a Spanish accent."
If Mr. García expresses some qualms about Mr. Almodóvar's methods, he's no less impatient with Hollywood's. "Hollywood has made some of the best movies in the world," he says. But then he goes on and on about how shallow it seems: "Poor, poor directors that make films in the United States. The big studios only allow them to make films if they meet certain conditions. And if those conditions ruin the integrity of the film, then the film is ruined, and it's a huge waste of time."
He says that no matter where he travels, he intends to keep his base here. This country lives an almost eternal identity crisis, he says, set as it is between one of the poorest corners of the world and the only remaining superpower. It makes for lots of great stories to tell. In fact, Mr. Garcia and his friend and Y Tu Mamá También co-star Diego Luna have been talking about producing a series of films from each of this country's 32 states. And his homeless days may finally be coming to an end: he's made a bid on a house. "This is the place that excites me," he says. "I have a strong itch that keeps me here, to be a part of this place. I think that if I abandon it, I'll become just another actor, like all the rest."
