Gael Garcia Bernal may be one of Hollywood's most wanted, but the talented actor is in no rush, he tells Michael Dwyer, Film Correspondent
One of the brightest discoveries to emerge in these early years of 21st century cinema, 25-year-old Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal is not only charming and handsome, but remarkably discerning in the roles he accepts. It can only be a matter of time before Hollywood is beating down his door and flooding him with offers, but he is in no hurry to take the money and run to Los Angeles.
He still lives in Mexico City, and is now deciding between two Mexican projects, one of which is likely to be his next movie. "I cannot say anything about them because the worst film is the one that you don't make," he says. "But, for me to try to keep on being an actor, the only point of reference I have that is immediate is Mexico. I was born there and I live there. I'm from Guadalajara and I go back there a lot as a way of finding reassurance."
Bernal had a higher profile than many far more experienced actors traipsing the red carpet at last month's Cannes Film Festival, where he enjoyed the distinction of starring in both the opening presentation, Pedro Alomdóvar's deservedly acclaimed Bad Education, and in Walter Selles's competition entry, The Motorcycle Diaries, screened a few days later to equally positive reviews.
When we talked at a beach restaurant in Cannes, Bernal was bemused by the circus that is the festival. "This is such a pagan and mystical celebration that if you didn't know it was all about films, you might think it was to do with some form of religion."
Mix the two - movies and religion - and the combination can be potent, as Bernal discovered when he played the title role in the Mexican drama, The Crime of Fr Amaro, as an idealistic young priest who becomes sexually involved with his housekeeper's teenage daughter. The film came under attack from the Catholic Church in Mexico, attracting so much media coverage that it went on to break box-office records.
"What the church did was incredibly altruistic," he laughs. "They made the film a big hit and they didn't ask for any payment for doing this. They were telling people not to go and see it even before it was released and before anyone had seen it, including themselves. Of course, if you tell people not to watch a film, that gets them interested in seeing it.
"I was surprised by their reaction, because I thought they would use that film to purge themselves. They could have supported the film and admitted that these things had happened for years, and said they were trying to change all that. But on the contrary, they attacked the film and in a way committed hara-kiri by doing that. I'm sure they will do the same with the Almodóvar film, and I hope they do."
In Almodóvar's partly autobiographical screenplay for Bad Education, one of the protagonists is a young film director in 1980s Madrid, Enrique (Fela Martinez), who seeks out a new project when an unexpected visitor (played by Bernal) offers him a script. This young man introduces himself as Ignacio, Enrique's closest friend at school in the 1960s, who has changed his name to Angel to further his ambitions as an actor, and who volunteers to play a transvestite in the film. His script is based on the childhood experiences of Enrique and Ignacio at the school where a manipulative priest jealously separated them to prey on Ignacio.
Bernal responds admirably to the challenge of playing both the enigmatic Angel and the troubled transvestite of the film-within-the-film, and without giving any more away, it's accurate to say that Bernal has a third role to play in this complex but enthralling and accessible drama.
"The film was a challenge for me on many levels," Bernal says. "It didn't create any confusion for me to play the different roles. It was just a matter of concentrating on the characters and getting it right, which takes a lot of preparation. First of all, they are also creations from Pedro Alomodóvar's world, which is a very specific and personal world, and it is very complicated when you try to get into someone else's mind like that.
"Then, probably for the first time, I was playing characters with whom I didn't share any of their cultural baggage. One is a Spanish transvestite in 1977, which is very different from how Spain is now. Then there was the matter of getting the Spanish accent right - and playing a girl, which I hadn't done before! It was a very exciting challenge, although I must admit that there were many times when we were shooting that I was afraid I wouldn't get it right.
"Pedro asked me to try out for the film, so we did two days - one in rehearsal and the other shooting screen tests to see how I looked as a girl. He gave me a lot of freedom, and I trusted his vision. I decided just to go for it and found myself doing things I wouldn't have done otherwise. I enjoyed it. I had moments of cathartic happiness and other times when I just despaired about getting it right."
Almodóvar chose Bernal over the other actors he auditioned because "he was very attractive as a boy and as a girl". That "was essential for understanding his character's relationship with the others, the intensity with which everyone becomes obsessed with him." He added: "Gael is going to work a lot and he's going to make a lot of money."
Bernal laughs out loud on hearing this. "Well, if I keep working in Latin America, I won't make lots of money because nobody gets paid very much for making films there. In Mexico, to act in films is more like an act of faith rather than a formula for financial success." His mother, Patricia Bernal, and his father, José Angel Garcia, are stage actors in Mexico, and he made his theatre debut with them when he was a child. "I started acting as a child because I wanted to play and have a laugh, and I saw acting as just another way of doing that," he says. "All my life I wanted to act but I never thought I would do it professionally. My parents never advised me about acting, one way or another, except by being who they were and by allowing me to observe their experiences."
By the time he was in his early teens, Gael Garcia Bernal was starring in a popular Mexican TV soap opera with his childhood friend, Diego Luna. When he was 17, he went to London and studied at the Central School of Speech and Drama. After making a number of movies on returning to Mexico, he attracted international attention for the first time when he played the streetwise young man in love with his sister-in-law in Alejandro Gonzales Inarritu's powerful debut film, Amores Perros (2000).
Bernal scored another hit a year later when he and Diego Luna were reunited to play close friends on an emotional journey of self-discovery in Alfonso Cuaron's exuberant, sensual and bittersweet Mexican road movie, Y Tu Mama Tambien.
Luna went on to appear in a number of Hollywood movies - the western, Open Range; the sequel, Dirty Dancing 2 - Havana Nights; and the new Steven Spielberg movie, The Terminal - but Bernal is prepared to wait as long as it takes until the right part comes his way in the US.
"I don't really judge films by where they come from," he says. "If the story is great and worth telling, and it gets me curious, then I'll do it no matter where it comes from. I have no doubt about that. And I believe that some of the best films ever made have come from the United States. I believe more in people than in institutions or their government, and the United States is ultimately about its people. I think these two new films, Bad Education and The Motorcycle Diaries, will be hits there because audiences want something that treats them intelligently."
The Motorcycle Diaries is another road movie for him, but apart from the fact that it is set in 1952 while Y Tu Mama Tambien is set in the present, Bernal draws further distinctions between the two films. "In Y Tu Mama, the characters are not worried about anything they come across, whereas in The Motorcycle Diaries, the characters become concerned about what they see,and their journey changes them in different ways." Bernal subtly and expressively portrays the young Che Guevra in The Motorcycle Diaries, the new film from Salles, the Brazilian director of Central Station. It begins in January, 1952, when Guevera, a 23-year-old medical student, leaves his well-to-do family behind in Buenos Aires and takes off with a pharmacist friend on an eventful journey through Argentina, Chile and Peru en route to Venezeula.
As they travel through extremes of climate changes, and of wealth and poverty, the idealistic young Guevera's social conscience is nagged and heightened by the experiences of people he meets along the way - dispossessed farmers, exploited mine workers, and the inhabitants of a leper colony.
"Of course, there is a responsibility involved with playing a real-life person, and especially someone as well-known as Che Guevara," Bernal says.
"In the case of playing him and in making a film that addresses issues about Latin America, there was an additional personal responsibility. I had to face the challenge of doing justice to what Che Guevara means to me." Which is? "Do we have time?" he asks. "I could talk for hours about that.
"But basically, and this isn't really doing him justice, there are two reasons why he means a lot to me. On a practical level, I am a son of the post-Cuban revolution and that changed the world order and especially the whole of Latin America. It was through that that my parents met, so I wouldn't have been born if that hadn't happened.
"There also has been so much disinformation about Che Guevara, and so many people know him only through his t-shirts. It's a great brand. Dolce and Guevara! That iconic thing has turned him into a myth, separating him from the person he really was, even though he was a man who spent his life fighting against myths. The film returns him to the personal level, as it presents him at that crucial stage in his life when he went on that journey through Latin America that changed him forever.
"In Latin American history, and especially in Mexican history, all of the heroes are losers. The majority lost. All those liberators died trying to gain independence. But Che Guevara won the Cuban revolution and set a model to follow. We can criticise it a lot, but that's another long discussion.
"What I most admired about him was how he managed to marry his ideals with his life. That, for any politician nowadays, is pretty rare."
It's just as rare, and refreshing, to meet a fast-rising young actor as grounded as Bernal. "I wake up with myself every day," he says. "The perceptions other people might have of me are things I don't know how to manipulate, or want to manipulate. I don't get up and look in the mirror and think that I'm getting famous. That's something outside my control. And I have no intention of letting myself get distracted by all that and having it disrupting my life. In the end, it's all very ephemeral and trivial, and there comes a moment when it disappears."
Bad Education opened at selected cinemas yesterday. The Motorcycle Diaries will be released on August 27th