#ggb interview

But the steamy 2001 movie, about best friends on a road trip through Mexico, was a hit. It became one of the highest-grossing Spanish-language films in the U.S. And it anointed García Bernal and his costar, Diego Luna, as leading men.

The two actors had known each other since infancy, growing up together in Mexico City. “Anything I say stays short of all the complexities of the love and the brotherhood we have for each other,” García Bernal, 45, said of Luna. Together, he said, “we learned that to make cinema, you have to misbehave a little bit, but be humble as well.”

García Bernal has gone on to star in a variety of Spanish and English projects, including The Motorcycle Diaries, Babel and the TV adaptation of Station Eleven. All the while, he and Luna have remained close collaborators. The actors run a production company together called La Corriente del Golfo. And this month, for the first time in over a decade, they’re reuniting onscreen. Their new show, La Máquina, features García Bernal as an aging boxer and Luna as his flashy, corrupt manager. 

Now available on Hulu, La Máquina is the streamer’s first original Spanish-language series. “It was about time,” García Bernal said. “We’re very happy that it’s happening like this.”

García Bernal lives in Buenos Aires and Mexico City. Here, he shares his most prized possessions, how he got into character for his latest role and advice from a Nobel laureate. 

What time do you get up on Mondays, and what’s the first thing you do after waking up?

Naturally, I wake up very early. My ancestors must have been people who worked the land. I hate when I wake up late. Sometimes I go straight to having a coffee or reading the newspaper or even, heroically, exercising. But that doesn’t happen so often because I always wake up very hungry.

What do you eat in the morning, and do you drink coffee?

Mainly fruits. In Mexico, there’s really good coffee. I do a pour-over. 

What do you do for exercise? 

I’ve been into boxing for a long time. I jump rope, go run, sometimes I hang from things. And I love playing football and baseball. 

What about skin care?

Nothing. I think it’s better actually. The washing-your-face industry has created a lot of problems for skin. I think it’s too much soap. 

How did you prepare to play the boxer Esteban in the new Hulu series? Did you model the character on any real life boxers or athletes? 

It was an amalgam of many boxers that I admire. We took a lot from all of them, but at the same time, there was something that came out, which is the boxer I have inside. It’s a bit like the clown in acting. We all have a boxer, we all have a clown. 

How would you describe your boxer?

What I found is that I’m really good at receiving punches. I think I read the ring really well. I’m able to figure out what’s going to happen, how to move around. The problem is that I run out of stamina very easily from hitting hard. Something happens after 10 punches. My punches start to become complete butter. 

Diego looks so different in this role, with his spray tan and a face that appears full of fillers. How did you keep a straight face while playing opposite him?

We had to try really hard not to laugh, but we managed. He made a big sacrifice as well. It takes a lot of time to do all of that, and it’s uncomfortable. 

There’s a great karaoke scene in the series. What’s your go-to karaoke song? 

I’m very promiscuous with my karaoke tastes. Most of the songs that I would end up singing in karaoke are older, like from the 1980s—the time of a man or a woman and a microphone. Nowadays it’s more complicated because a lot of songs have autotune.

Your characters from Y tu Mamá También, Julio and Tenoch, would be around 40 years old today. What do you think they’d be doing now?

I think maybe my character would be in government in Mexico right now. Diego’s character would be, I don’t know, a successful lawyer somewhere. I always wonder, where did they end up? Maybe because those are the characters that are closest to our upbringing as well, the closest we’ve ever been to playing ourselves. 

The movie captures so well the feeling of being young and having your entire life in front of you. How do you look back on it?

Our voices sound different. It’s actually very tender because we were very innocent. We didn’t feel like it when we were that age, but I hear us: We sound hopeful and interested and also brave and wanting to experience [life].

What’s your most prized possession? 

The notebooks I write in. The stones I gather. On every journey I make, I put stones in my bag. They weigh a lot, but I have a lot of stones. Certain photographs of my family. And there’s a football and some shoes that remind me of my childhood.

Do you have any hobbies that might surprise your fans? 

I do a lot of jumping rope, I can do a few tricks with that. I juggle. I play a lot of chess.

What’s one piece of advice you’ve gotten that’s guided you? 

Interview by Dave Calhoun

(source but I can never get AnOther Man articles to display properly)

He played Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries. He made a stunning drag queen in Bad Education. Now he’s a confused young Parisian who can’t distinguish between dreams and waking-life in The Science of Sleep, Michel Gondry’s latest mind-warp of a movie. He’s worked for some of the world’s top directors, from Pedro Almodóvar to Walter Salles. He’s fiercely political, a true film lover, and an actor who genuinely puts his art before his bank balance. He’s also a powerful force behind the new wave of filmmaking in Latin America. And Gael Garcia Bernal is still only 27.

Last night, Bernal was knocking back drinks and dancing late into the night at a house party in Greenwich Village. The morning after, he’s sitting in a small diner in downtown Manhattan, talking spiritedly about the disastrous effects that globalisation is having on rural farmers in his home country of Mexico.

“It’s getting to the point where it’s going to implode,” Bernal warns, knocking back a coffee. “The people who will be affected will be the poor. The countries who are going to get fucked up are the poor ones. It’s going to lead to civil wars.”

The more you speak to Bernal, the more time you spend in his company, and the more of his friends and collaborators that you speak to, the more you begin to understand that there’s something unusual about this young actor. There’s a refreshing, even old-fashioned, seriousness to the way he approaches his life and work. He’s unusually engaged – politically, culturally and socially – in a way that isn’t awkward or mannered. He’s hungry to learn, to work with the right people, to do the right thing, to make a difference. There’s a natural, confident ease in his commitment to cinema, politics and the world around him. If all this makes him sound too earnest, it shouldn’t; he’s as comfortable sniggering about beach parties in Brazil as he is dissecting politics. It’s all one life to him.

Bernal first grabbed the attention of the art-house crowd in 2000 in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Amores Perros, an extreme story of three lives that collide in one car crash amid the chaos of Mexico City. He was 21. In the following year, he filmed the sexually charged road movie Y tu mamá también, which made him, alongside good friend and co-star Diego Luna, Mexico’s most in-demand young actor.

“We had finally discovered a new face,” remembers Carlos Cuarón, writer of Y tu mamá también and brother of the film’s director, Alfonso Cuarón.

“Here was a new young actor who could sustain emotion in a very different way. After seeing Gael in a short film a year or two before Amores Perros came out, I remember calling my brother and saying to him, ‘Man, you have to see this guy.’ He was like, ‘Yeah, thanks, I’m busy right now.’”

A year or two passed before Alfonso saw Gael in action. “Alejandro González Iñárritu is a friend of ours and he showed Alfonso an early cut of Amores Perros,” continues Carlos. “That was the moment when Alfonso said, ‘I want that guy!’ I was on the telephone saying, ‘I told you so!’”

Since then, Bernal has played a youthful Che Guevara in an award-winning performance for Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles in The Motorcycle Diaries, a fox of a transvestite (and according to one critic a “dead ringer for Julia Roberts”) for the Spanish auteur Pedro Almodóvar in Bad Education, and opposite Charlotte Gainsbourg in French director Michel Gondry’s latest movie, The Science of Sleep. It’s an impressive roll-call of collaborators. And still not one Hollywood movie in sight.

“I think Tijuana is the closest I’ve ever got to Hollywood,” Bernal jokes as we talk about the three months he recently spent on location in the notorious Mexican border town for Alejandro González Iñárritu’s latest film, Babel. “It sounds like a really bad tragedy, doesn’t it? The Closest I Ever Got to Hollywood Was Tijuana!”

Carlos Cuarón agrees that Bernal’s acting path has been remarkable. “The really crazy thing about Gael is that he’s probably the most famous Mexican actor nowadays, but he still hasn’t done a Hollywood movie. He chooses his projects very intelligently. He picks them because he likes the director or because he thinks the script is amazing or because there are other interesting actors in the film. Usually, people become famous across the world because of Hollywood movies, he hasn’t had to go that route.”

Bernal’s commitment is thrown into sharp relief when he talks about his move to London to go to drama school at the age of 17 a decade ago. He was shocked by the country’s apathy to politics and culture. He expected the Rolling Stones, the Marquee Club and arthouse cinema. Instead what he found were the Spice Girls, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, and students who would rather sit drinking in pubs or subject themselves to pharmaceutical testing than attend a political rally.

“I found it difficult coming from Mexico,” Bernal explains. “In Mexico, there’s this feeling that everything you do has a political complexity. Which it does. Whatever you do, whoever you say hello to, whichever part of the neighbourhood you go to... Everything has this huge political complexity, as well as social, emotional and sexual.

“I think my attitude also has something to do with my family. They work in the theatre, underground theatre, so maybe I was pretentious, or snobbish perhaps.”

Bernal’s teenage years coincided with a tumultuous time in Mexico. The country was emerging from what he labels “an old tyrant democracy”, and the Zapatista movement in Mexico’s southern state of Chiapas was rising up against the government. Street demonstrations were part of everyday life. Bernal and his family lived comfortably in Mexico City – his mother is an actor, his father an actor and director – but like many kids of his age he was swept up by the energy and sheer excitement of the capital’s mass support for the Zapatistas.

“That movement polarised the country, but it also united a lot of people,” Bernals recalls. “We helped to stop the war. Because of that, it felt like what we did counted. Something like a million and a half people demonstrated every day when the war between the government and the guerrillas started. I was very involved. I was writing and reading about the situation, helping to send food, and demonstrating on the marches. It was great. I was young, and it was fun. And, I’ve got to say, I met my first girlfriend – my first real girlfriend – there as well. It was a great place to meet girls!”

Sex and politics. There’s nothing po-faced about Bernal’s political engagement. It’s wrapped up in movies, fun, friendships, music, travel, theatre and family. There’s something pleasing and traditionally bohemian about all this. There is often a sense in Europe and North America, that we are too comfortable, cynical even, and few people believe that protest – let alone art – can make a difference. Bernal would get along just fine in Paris circa 1968.

All of which helps to explain why he spent the past ten days at the World Trade Organisation summit in Hong Kong. His world doesn’t end with himself and his films. In Hollywood, political engagement, more often than not, means rash gestures and red faces all round. Bernal’s engagement is more steady, more regular, more constant. He quietly attended the protests at the G8 summit in Edinburgh last year on the same weekend that Madonna, Elton et al performed at the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park. In Hong Kong, he sat in meeting after meeting, discussing ideas, presenting case studies and assisting delegates such as Mary Robinson, the former Irish president (“La Presidenta!” as Bernal calls her, laughing). Before travelling to Hong Kong, he spent some time in Chiapas, discovering for himself the effect that free trade is having on local maize and coffee producers.

He’s fully aware that his profile as an actor is a selling point for organisations such as Oxfam, but still he makes sure – indeed demands – that he’s fully informed. He’s not interested in being an intelligent pretty face. He wants to get stuck in. He arrived at the Hong Kong summit with an undefined role, but was soon speaking out at meetings.

“Little by little, I started to get into it and became really interested in everything,” he explains. “Oxfam asked me if I wanted to be in the talks and negotiations.”

He jokes about something else that he picked up at the summit, after some Germans he met fell about laughing when they heard his name. “Gael” it turns out, means “horny” in German. You can already see the pin-up poster tag-line in the German equivalent of Teen Vogue: “Ich bin Gael”, it would read, pasted across a brooding portrait of the actor. It wouldn’t be anything new. “Mexican heart-throb”, “Sex Mex”, “The sexiest thing to come out of Latin America since Ricky Martin” are just some of the tacky headlines – often in upmarket publications – that have been written recently about Bernal.

The conversation turns to Live 8. Bernal admits that he feels a strong sense of unease towards events like these.

“I was a bit critical of Live 8. The people that organised it act as if they are there to safeguard our souls, and present it as a civil action, as if it’s our civil duty to go to a concert. Many of the people who took part made no more effort to do this concert than they would to make a Pepsi commercial. Some of these artists are the same people who advertise Coca Cola. People in Mexico don’t have clean water, yet they’ve drunk Coca Cola all their lives. It’s cheaper to get a Coke than to get clean drinking water. That in itself is a strong image of how much power such companies wield across the world.”

Such independent thinking is present too in Bernal’s attitude to films and filmmaking. He’s happier on the margins, where the ideas and imagination lie. It’s interesting to contrast his career with the young American actors of a similar stature – those who, one minute are hailed as the new saviours of independent cinema, and the next, are dressing up as Spiderman or nestling happily in King Kong’s computer-generated fur. It’s easier to say yes than it is to say no, as Bernal has consistently replied to all approaches from Hollywood.

The screenwriter Milo Addica (Monster’s Ball and Birth) tells a good story about how Bernal accepted the lead role in The King, which he wrote and produced. It’s an independent American movie that British director James Marsh shot in late 2004. When the film was still in the casting stage, many young American actors read the script and liked it, but, as Addica recalls, backed off for what he calls “moral reasons”. They didn’t like the film’s violence or the ambiguity of a lead character who starts out as a hero, but commits an horrific act in the film’s closing moments. Bernal, on the other hand, leapt at the chance. He plays Elvis Valderez, a young American with a Mexican mother, who leaves the navy and goes in search of his father (William Hurt), a popular Baptist preacher who never knew his illegitimate son. It’s a search that ultimately has terrible consequences. Bernal does a good job in his first American film.

“We went to a number of young actors, all of who you know but I won’t name names,” Addica explains. “They all liked the script but were concerned with the audience’s perception. They wanted changes made to accommodate that. Of course, when you pay an actor $20 million he will do an Irish jig on the table for you. He doesn’t give a flying fuck.” Needless to say, $20 million was not on offer for The King.

Bernal is not easily tempted by a pay cheque. “A film with no point of view is such a waste of money,” he considers. “So much money is spent on films. Oh man, spend that money somewhere else!”

Bernal’s attitude to cinema is rooted in Mexico – rooted in the struggle to get films made – personal stories, real storytelling, strong ideas. He says that making The Motorcycle Diaries, for which he travelled through Argentina, Peru and Mexico, reaffirmed his commitment to Latin America and Latin American cinema. Last month, his production company in Mexico City opened for business in partnership with Diego Luna. They’ve already launched a travelling documentary festival that began in Mexico City and is due to visit 16 towns across the country.

As an actor, Bernal is drawn to the filmmakers he has worked with. He wants to learn more, and says unashamedly that he usually wants to be friends with his directors.

“That was the best thing about all these films, on a very personal level, getting to know these people,” he says. “To be their friends, actually. That’s the best thing, and I really get emotional about that. Many people have explained what cinema is, but so far, to me, the best appreciation is that cinema is further proof, further affirmation that fiction can move people more than reality, more than the facts. Also that in the process of making films you get to travel and make friends.”

This isn’t just talk. Michel Gondry, who last year directed Bernal in his latest film, is effusive about the actor who he now counts as a good friend. In The Science of Sleep, Bernal plays Stephane, a half-Mexican, half-French young man whose colourful dreams have a bizarre effect on his waking-life. On the phone from New York, Gondry mentions that he has borrowed Bernal’s old apartment in the city while he works on the post-production of his film in time for Sundance. The two became close both before and during the shoot. When they first met, Gondry hadn’t quite completed his script, so he and Bernal discussed ideas together. Gondry is happy to credit Bernal with offering crucial input to the finished screenplay.

“He’s a great person on top of being a great actor,” Gondry says warmly. “He’s very caring and we’ve become very, very close. He’s very committed. The character he was playing in my film is close to me, so we had to find out what we both had in common. That takes time, and he was really pleased to spend time getting to know me. He’s also just a machine of happiness. During the shoot, he would always make everybody happy and entertain them.”

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."