Ironically, Banderas is finally getting rave reviews for his latest film: Shrek 2, in which he is the voice of Puss in Boots, played as a hilarious feline spoof of his Zorro character. Puss is hired by Princess Fiona’s parents, the king and queen of Far, Far Away, to whack Shrek. The additional irony is that Banderas, who spoke not a word of English when he first came to work in America in 1992, is now being acclaimed for a role in which he uses only his voice. “This is the first time in my life that I am totally secure that they didn’t call me because of my looks,” he quips.
It is his astonishing good looks, of course, that have propelled him into the fantasy life of millions of women — and men — throughout the world, including Madonna, who was shown openly lusting after him in her 1991 documentary Truth or Dare. Even the resolutely heterosexual Tom Hanks, who worked with Banderas in the Oscar-nominated Aids film Philadelphia, joked that he was the only person he’d consider being unfaithful to his wife with.
You can see why. Banderas is captivatingly charismatic. It’s impossible to resist his primal charm. He’s completely focused, turning what for many stars might be another mundane interview into a seductive performance, offering apparent nuggets of intimacy, acting out scenes and memories as if he’s auditioning for the role of his life. It’s a bravura performance. Even the anachronistic little ponytail he sports looks fabulously cool. And, in his deliciously accented English, he is honest enough to admit he’s made some dubious choices in recent years.
“The last six years of my life in Hollywood, I have worked almost frantically, almost compulsively,” he says. “Some of that is because sometimes you compromise your life for the next few years, and then, when you realise you have made a mistake, you are committed.” But there was a purpose, he insists. With the money he has made, he says he has been able to buy his freedom as an artist. “I am not going to do jobs I have done before. I am at an intersection in my life. Next I will do Zorro, because I loved the first one, but right after that I may go back to Broadway (he took on his first role there, in the musical Nine, last year). I want to do now what is in my heart.”
In recent months, especially in the wake of the Madrid bombings, Banderas, who makes his home in LA, has also had to deal with an undercurrent of criticism in Spain, particularly in cultural circles, where people are aware of his origins in left-wing, anti-Franco political theatre and his early, provocative work with Pedro Almodovar. “I am conscious that in private conversations, people do say things,” he admits, “because I have friends that were there. As the situation changed here with the war in Iraq, more sensibilities were awakened, and some people have said things against me as a political attack (because he lives in the USA). Which is stupid, because I don’t have communion with George Bush, obviously. People in Spain who have never visited the USA think that when you are walking on the street there are thousands of Bushes. I always say one thing to people: what is America, really? It’s Bob Dylan or George Bush. It’s McCarthy or Martin Luther King. And what is Spain? It is ETA or Picasso. We all have our shit to hide. It’s a human thing; you don’t have to agree with an administration to be living in a country. But I didn’t lose the sense of my homeland. When I go back, I am always active politically, socially, culturally.” In fact, Banderas, who is a friend of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the recently elected socialist prime minister of Spain, has been strongly opposed to the war in Iraq and Spain’s participation in it.
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These days, he is keen to tout his closeness to his homeland. He has invested most of his money in Spain and has a house in Marbella, not far from where he grew up in Malaga. And he is backing a theatre in Malaga. He has bought the rights to a novel called El Camino de los Ingleses (The Way of the British), by Antonio Soler, which he plans to direct. It is about a group of kids growing up in 1977, just after Franco’s death, “at a time when Spain was changing politically and the country was moving towards democracy; it’s pretty much my story”. And he says he is hoping to work again with Almodovar, on Tarantula. Banderas would play a plastic surgeon whose daughter is raped. He kidnaps one of the men who did it, changes him into a woman and falls in love with him. “Only Almodovar, right?” he laughs. “Frankenstein with a little edge.”
But the simple and surprising truth is that Banderas has not made a film in Spain for more than a decade. His last Spanish film was Dispara! (1993), directed by Carlos Saura. And it is 15 years since he has worked with Almodovar, a partnership that helped define post-Franco Spain. They made five remarkable films together: Labyrinth of Passion, Matador, Law of Desire, Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! The son of a secret policeman and a teacher, Banderas became obsessed with the theatre after seeing a performance of Hair when he was 14. After studying at drama school in Malaga — he was once jailed by the Franco authorities for performing Brecht — he moved to Madrid in 1981, becoming a member of the National Theatre of Spain. Almodovar cast him in Labyrinth of Passion in 1982.
But Banderas says he never had any ambitions to become a Hollywood star. “It was just too far away for me, not just geographically, but culturally,” he says. “It was something that would have made me dizzy if I’d thought it was a possibility at that time. Sometimes in my life, things happen by accident. This was like that, without me being aware of what happened.” Even when he was cast in his first American film, as a Cuban musician in The Mambo Kings in 1992, he didn’t expect it would lead anywhere, because he couldn’t speak English. He had to learn his lines phonetically. After that, he went straight back to Spain. The following year, he was called to do Phila-delphia. And went back to Spain. Got called to do Assassins. And went back to Spain. Then he went to Florida to make the comedy Two Much and met Melanie Griffith, ending his eight-year marriage to the Spanish actress Ana Leza and cementing his Hollywoodisation.
More completely than even he ever expected, Banderas has settled into the life of the Hollywood star. However, you can’t help but sense that he’s not entirely comfortable with it. “I don’t have a strong social life here,” he says. “Not strong, but none. Melanie and I live a very, very family life with our kids.” Yet there is no doubt where he has cast his lot. Although he insists, “If I was living on my own, I wouldn’t mind crashing on a camp bed every night,” In Style magazine recently featured the $4.2m, six-bedroom, Tuscan-style villa in the Hancock Park area of LA where he lives with Griffith and their three children. The house has “frescoed walls, stencilled ceilings, a greenhouse, a wine vault and even a formal ballroom”. In the basement, they have built a recording studio for Banderas and a dual gym where Griffith does Pilates and Banderas works out. They have also bought and demolished the property next door.
Griffith, 46, and Banderas have one daughter of their own, Stella, who is seven, and two children from Griffith’s previous marriages, Alexander, 18, and Dakota, 14, her daughter with Don Johnson. Although the couple have always seemed very much in love, they have been plagued by tabloid rumours of problems, rumours exacerbated by Griffith’s alcohol and drug addictions, which included a spell in rehab after becoming dependent on the painkiller Norco. And on her (frankly, extremely kooky) website, Griffith mentions rumours that Banderas warned her not to have any more plastic surgery. She says that if the originator of the rumours “could clue me in to my latest surgery, I would be extremely grateful”.
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Standards of beauty are very much on the menu when I meet Banderas, because, as he acknowledges, one of the main messages of the Shrek movies, in which everyone seems to fall in love with ostensibly ugly ogres, is that beauty is much more than skin-deep. Banderas says that is something he tries to impress on those around him, particularly his wife and stepdaughter. “What I try, for people that I love, even my wife, is to say, ‘Wrinkles are beautiful too’,” he confides. “They are like carats. (The more the better.)
I think it’s about changing the conception of what beauty is all about and accepting the age that you are. I think it is very important, at least, to put it in the mind of your family, because otherwise, it becomes a real problem, a problem with unbelievable consequences sometimes. My stepdaughter, she is going to be 15 and is now very worried because she’s got a millimetre more of fat (round her thigh),” he adds. “I have to explain to her this is normal, that her hormonal system is changing, that she needs all that energy for all the many things women have to be.”
While Banderas has good advice for those around him, it will be interesting to see if he takes his own and allows the millions he has made in Hollywood to buy him his artistic freedom. At the very least, I hope it gives him the freedom, perhaps the courage, to work again with Almodovar. Or perhaps it is one of those putative reunions, like Morrissey and Johnny Marr, that remains better in conception.
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