GAEL GARCIA BERNAL
GAEL Force
Famous for playing a young Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, it’s no surprise that Gael García Bernal is still radical
Mexican actor Gael García Bernal is a rare exception to the supposed rule that appearing in big-budget American studio movies is the only path to global screen superstardom.
“I think that Tijuana is the closest I’ve ever got to Hollywood,” he jokes, referring to the three months he spent in the notorious border town in 2006, shooting the multi-award-winning movie, Babel. “It’s not that Hollywood is not appealing, or that I’m holding back. But if a Latin American film like Babel or The Motorcycle Diaries comes up, I’m going to do it. It’s just about doing what I like.”
Bernal turned 30 in November, and it’s hard to imagine that only 10 years ago, he was a student at London’s Central School of Speech and Drama. Having acted on stage and in TV soap operas back in Mexico City, he arrived in London in 1997, aged 18, looking for adventure. Instead, he ended up working as a labourer on building sites and as a barman in Cuba Libre, an Islington bar. Frustrated, he applied to Central and was the first ever Mexican student to be accepted by the prestigious school.
It was in 1999, during his second year at Central, that Bernal received a phone call from Mexican director Alejandro González Iñárritu, who had seen him in a play in Mexico City a few years beforehand, and wondered if he’d be able to do a few weeks filming on a movie he was shooting called Amores Perros.
“In England, they don’t let you miss school,” Bernal explains. “If you miss school for three days, you get chucked out. In Mexico, this is completely incomprehensible. So I told Alejandro, and he came up with a good Latin American solution to this problem – he said that a relative was a director of a hospital, and he would be able to get me a medical certificate to say that I had contracted some big tropical disease on my last visit to Mexico. People believed me completely. I only missed one week of drama school, so it wasn’t that bad. But my classmates sent get-well cards to me in Mexico, which was embarrassing.”
The embarassment was worth it, as Bernal’s performance in Amores Perros won him a Silver Ariel – Mexico’s equivalent of an Academy Award. The film was nominated for the Best Foreign Film Oscar, became a worldwide hit, and is widely credited with launching La Buena Onda – the new wave of Latin American cinema.
The following year, he struck gold again, with Alfonso Cuaron’s Y tu mamá también (“And your mother, too”), the story of two young Mexicans who embark on a road trip with an older woman. It became the most popular domestically made film in Mexico’s history. Bernal was still at Central when he worked on the film. “But that was OK,” he grins. “I was in my third year by then.”
Since then, he has played Che Guevara for Brazilian filmmaker Walter Salles in The Motorcycle Diaries; a beautiful tranvestite for Pedro Almodóvar in Bad Education (a role which involved dropping his Mexican pronunciation and perfecting his Spanish accent); and a romantic dreamer opposite Charlotte Gainsbourg in French director Michel Gondry’s surreal The Science of Sleep.
Multilingual (he speaks perfect English as well as Italian, French and Portuguese) and cosmopolitan, Bernal is that truly modern phenomenon – a global star. And yet at the same time, he is refreshingly old-fashioned in the earnest way that he approaches his profession.
Passionate, intellectual and politically engaged, you can imagine him being more at home in the counter-cultural world of 1970s cinema. “My parents were actors,” Bernal explains. “And for me it was obvious I would be an actor. I was a drawn to this adult world where they played like kids. From the age of 13, I did plays constantly until I left school. It was great. I loved to be with adults. Especially grown-up girls.”
Moving to London was a decision he made on a whim. “My plan was eventually to visit Russia,” he shrugs. “I didn’t know a single person in London. I had the address of a friend of a friend, and that was all. I spent my early weeks sleeping on floors.” Once enrolled at Central, Bernal moved into a flat in north London’s less than salubrious Finsbury Park with a group of fellow students.
London would remain his base for many years, even after his career had taken off and he was flying around the world to various far-flung locations. “I didn’t have time to move,” he shrugs. It’s clear that London holds a special place in his heart, and in 2005 he returned to his old haunts to perform in a limited run of Federico García Lorca’s Blood Wedding at the Almeida Theatre. “It was cool because I got to hang out in Islington with my old friends from Central,” he says.
As his role as Leonardo in Blood Wedding demonstrates, Bernal has never been one to shy away from darker characters. His most recent release was Blindness, a troubling drama by Fernando Meirelles – the Oscar-nominated Brazilian director of City of God – about life after an epidemic that has rendered much of the world sightless. In it, civilisation soon gives way to lawlessness.
Bernal’s characters in Babel and in 2006’s The King were also morally compromised, and other young actors had turned down the roles for fear of damaging their audience profile. Bernal has no such qualms. “I do characters that I like and that are human,” he shrugs. He is similarly relaxed when it comes to nudity, and can’t understand why his peers might hesitate about undressing for a movie: “Whenever an actor or actress says: ‘I won’t do nudity unless the story demands it,’ they’re the first people to take their kit off! ‘I would only do it for artistic reasons.’ Yeah right! Come on, there’s nothing artistic about it, but I don’t have a problem with it either.”
Female cinema-goers are the first to applaud such liberal sentiments. In spite of his diminutive stature (he’s only 5ft 7in) Bernal has become the ultimate art-house pin-up. A reluctant sex symbol, he goes to great lengths to play down his sensuous good looks, commenting: “My body is not like Brad Pitt’s, and I certainly don’t look like Orlando Bloom. I don’t see myself as a sex god. But it’s impossible to control. It’s a bit like a nickname. The more you say: ‘Don’t call me that,’ the more people do. You just have to accept these things and feel pleased.”
His profile in the world of gossip magazines received a hefty boost in 2003, when he began a long-running affair with actress Natalie Portman. They split up in 2004, but the on-off romance spluttered on until 2007.
Now, however, Bernal has settled in Madrid with his current girlfriend, Argentinian actress Dolores Fonzi, and their newborn baby boy. While normally shy of the press, he and Dolores appear to have relaxed since their relocation overseas, kissing on the street and doing interviews with local media. “Having a child is the most beautiful thing there is,” Bernal said shortly before his son’s arrival. “Those who are already parents, they know this. And those who aren’t parents, soon we’ll know it, too.”
In spite of his new parental responsibilities, there seems little sign of Bernal reducing his work schedule, which now includes producing and directing. In 2006, he told Entertainment Weekly: “I just want to keep on doing what I like – developing stories, travelling, dreaming of living in other places. I want to keep up that insanity. It’s one of the healthiest things I can do for myself.”
The insanity may be temporarily on hold as he faces up to fatherhood, but it’s clear that Bernal has no intention of dropping his creative standards, or securing his financial future with a lucrative Hollywood action-flick. His current and future projects seem just as edgy and uncompromising as ever, with no sign of any giving in to the lure of Tinseltown’s lure.
Bernal has three new films due for release this year. In Pedro Páramo, he plays a man who travels back to the town where he grew up in Mexico to discover it is home only to ghosts of its former inhabitants. Then there’s maverick director Jim Jarmusch’s The Limits of Control, and Lukas Moodysson’s Mammoth, in which Bernal and rising star Michelle Williams play a husband and wife.
As his popularity around the world continues to grow, there seems little chance of Bernal losing his sense of humour. “I wake up with myself every day,” he laughs. “I don’t wake up thinking: ‘Shit, man, I’m a huge star!’”
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