Speaking to Banderas at length, you get the impression the movie career that has made him a household name is almost a sideline, a diversion from his true calling. “The thing is, I love movies, and movies gave me the potency and the strength to do all this, but in movies, as an actor, you are in the middle of the whole process,” he says. “You just give it your best, but you are in the supermarket: the director comes and picks up the best they can take from you to cook later in the editing room. They put in music that wasn’t there when you were performing, or they take lines out to make it faster, or they stretch out the time. But in theatre, as an actor, you are at the end of the process. The audience has a common union with the company, and they have to come to an agreement about how the show should go.”

Specifically, Banderas’s post-health-scare passion for the stage involves musical theatre. “Musicals are what made me an actor,” he says. “The reason is, I am a melomaniac. I love music. I have to have music as I do food every day. I have to listen to music. The spectrum of the music that I hear is very wide. I go from the latest things that have been published — from independent groups, whatever — to Mozart... prog-rock... Jazz is probably my favourite. But music applied to theatre is something that caught my attention from the time that I was very young.”

A Spanish-language version of A Chorus Line, a 1975 musical by Marvin Hamlisch and Edward Kleban, was the first production Banderas oversaw at the theatre (a building he has described as “my Harley, my private plane, my boat”) after a €2.3m refurbishment. The second was Company, the 1970 Tony award-winning work by George Furth and Stephen Sondheim. Next came Godspell, Stephen Schwartz’s stage retelling of the Gospel of Matthew, then the production currently on the posters: Gypsy, a work based loosely on the 1957 memoirs of the striptease artist Gypsy Rose Lee.

The countercultural and salacious nature, respectively, of Godspell and Gypsy tap into how Banderas’s background, and that of his native country, have shaped him. “I grew up in a Spain that was still dominated by a regime that was not very permissive of artistic freedom,” he says, referring to the dictatorship of General Franco, which ended with Franco’s death when Banderas was 15. “My country was transferring from dictatorship to democracy at the same time that I was transferring myself from being a kid to being an adult. I remember the Spain of Franco, and it was almost like living in a state of anaesthesia, one in which nothing really bad can happen to you in the streets but that is this kind of eerie feeling. No one would be assaulted at four o’clock in the morning; there was no delinquency, or anything like that. But what is the price for that? The price for that was very strong repression.”

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When an American company came to do Hair in Spain in 1976, which was the year after Franco died, it blew my mind! The relationship with the audience was so different. It was something that completely changed my life.  

His childhood experiences, Banderas says, have made him more attuned to the threats to democracy that exist today. “Sometimes I wonder if we are in a post-democratic world in which these devices we have” — he nods at my smartphone, balanced on the red velvet of the seat arm — “are making democracy a different game. We are totally mediatised by these. This is a machine of manipulation for people. You can throw messages out there which are not true. It’s very complicated just to know where democracies are now.”

Theatre is no match for the digital revolution and the mass- produced mendacious messaging it has caused, but, he says, in the wake of Franco’s rule it served as an antidote to the repression that had come before. “When an American company came to do Hair in Spain in 1976, which was the year after Franco died, it blew my mind! Being the son of a policeman — my father was a chief of police here in Málaga — and seeing this thing about the Vietnam War and these hippies going around... The relationship with the audience was so
different. I saw them coming out onto the stage and I thought, This is phenomenal. This was something that completely changed my life.”

Banderas describes Gypsy, meanwhile, as “the musical of musicals” and “a drama that is a very strong, profound, deep reflection on human beings and their relationship with success and with triumph. There is reflection about the pathology of success [when it comes to] a very specific side of America that is pushing you to be successful.” The production also accommodates Banderas’s yen for elaborate stagecraft. Digital paintings by the contemporary Spanish artist José Luis Puche are projected onto curtains — “So it becomes an abstraction of the painting” — and no expense is spared with music, either. “I could say, ‘I want to make some money, I could take 11 salaries out, I’m going to do that with a sampler’, but no. No! That’s not the way. I don’t want to do franchising.

“I’m going to do this type of theatre in the purest possible way. Nothing is pre-recorded. Everything has to be live, so the people can go back to that feeling — that feeling that is gaining strength as years go by, that as much as technology develops, [the connection between] the person there” — he gestures towards the stage — “and a person here” — he gestures around the audience area — “is unchangeable. Unchangeable. A group of people on a stage telling a story to another group of people that sit in front of them, that kind of ritual, will never change. It’s about 3,000 years of communication with audiences. In a way, it was for me to go back to the purest form of communication as an actor, which is this magical space called the stage.”

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I never had a relationship with Madonna... When we did Evita we became friends, but that was it.

A separate timeline

A common fallacy, peddled on Wikipedia and elsewhere, is that Madonna, who had a well-documented crush on the actor in the 1990s, introduced Banderas to Hollywood. Banderas says he “wouldn’t count” meeting Madge as a catalyst moment in his life. “It didn’t have so much meaning,” he says. “It’s true that I met her here in Spain, at a dinner with all of Pedro Almodóvar’s people. But I’d already done The Mambo Kings and Desperado. I never had a relationship with Madonna. I think my agent was very smart at the time. He says, ‘You’ve got a career already in America, you have done a couple of movies, don’t go there. Have dinner with her, whatever, because she invited you, but don’t get involved there, because everybody’s going to think whatever happens to you now is because of her’. When we did Evita we became friends, actually, but that was it. That was it. The last time I saw her was 10 years ago, maybe.”

Most people would consider Philadelphia Banderas’s major Hollywood breakthrough. Shortly afterwards came 1993’s The House of the Spirits alongside Meryl Streep, Jeremy Irons, Glenn Close and Winona Ryder, then 1994’s Interview with the Vampire, sharing a bill with Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise and Kirsten Dunst. By now Banderas’s star was soaring (and his English improving: “In The Mambo Kings, I said my lines phonetically — when I saw the movie for the first time I couldn’t understand everything,” he says). A turn opposite Sylvester Stallone in 1995’s Assassins; as Che Guevara in Evita, with Madonna (1996); the first of his two turns as the swashbuckling pulp hero Zorro (1998); and in John ‘Die Hard’ McTiernan’s historical drama The 13th Warrior (1999) would all follow before the decade was out.

Banderas’s Hollywood star has never faded since, thanks to acclaimed performances in movies ranging from the underrated (Woody Allen’s 2010 comedy You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger; Brian De Palma’s 2002 sexy noir tribute Femme Fatale) to the critically panned (Steven Soderbergh’s 2019 take on the Panama Papers saga, The Laundromat) and the sublime (Spanish-language black comedy Official Competition, in which he co-starred with his longstanding friend Penélope Cruz). Lest we forget, that cutlass- wielding feline got his own flick in 2022, and Banderas also lent his voice to this year’s instalment of the Paddington franchise.

But for those who favour the arthouse over the multiplex, a separate timeline exists in Banderas’s film career, beginning in the early 1980s with a chance meeting on a terrace outside Madrid’s Café Gijón before a performance of La Hija Del Aire (‘The Daughter of the Air’) by Pedro Calderón de la Barca. “You have a very romantic face,” a then obscure avant-garde director sporting an elaborate bouffant and carrying a red briefcase is said to have remarked to the then 20-year-old impoverished actor. “You should do movies.” The director in question, a film-scholar darling-in-the-making, was Pedro Almodóvar. He cast Banderas in Laberinto de Pasiones (‘Labyrinth of Passion’), a screwball sex comedy and an audacious dash of post-Franco counterculture, in 1982. It would become the first of eight movies to date that they have worked on together. The most critically acclaimed of these — 2019’s semi- autobiographical Pain and Glory — earned Banderas an Academy award nomination for his portrayal of a heroin-abusing quasi-version of Almodóvar. Arguably the most chilling is The Skin I Live In, a 2011 psycho-sexual thriller based loosely on the novel Tarantula by Thierry Jonquet, about a plastic  surgeon who has performed illegal transgenic surgery on his lover (Almodóvar has described the film as “a horror story without screams or frights”). But
for Banderas, it’s a much earlier movie — a kind of retelling of Beauty and the Beast, with Stockholm Syndrome a major theme and lashings of wince-inducing violence — that audiences of a sensitive nature most blench at. “There is a number of movies I have done in the past, with Almodóvar especially, that would be forbidden today,” he says, “and if we did Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! today, it would be a scandal. But in 1988 it was not a scandal. It was a very interesting reflection on relationships between women. People just connected to it in a very interesting way. Now, that would be almost impossible to do. So what has changed? We are different.”

How art stands up to changing societal values is an issue that, Banderas says, raises many existential questions. “Where are we going, what have we left behind, what do we lose, what do we gain?” he asks. I put it to him that even Philadelphia, lauded for its sensitive tackling of the Aids taboo and homophobia, might today be criticised, by some, for portraying HIV as essentially a homosexual disease. “Oh, yes, absolutely,” he says, citing as another example the 1939 classic Gone with the Wind being removed from U.S. streaming service HBO Max in 2020. “[We’re asked to] take the carpet and just brush everything under it,” he says. “The film has one of the most strong women in the history of motion pictures. Do you eliminate that? There were women like that at that time in Atlanta — but also, there was slavery. People were slaves. We shouldn’t forget that!”

Banderas also makes an interesting distinction between ‘colourblind’ casting decisions with existing classics from the cultural canon and doing so with an entirely new theatrical concept, such as Hamilton: An American Musical, the hip-hop Broadway show in which young black, Asian and Latino actors portray the ageing white Founding Fathers. “That’s very interesting, because the concept was originated like that,” he says. “It’s winking its eye at you from the first second of the play and the audience sees that George Washington is black. It’s good. But if we go back in time and we just take something and completely change it... ”

Interestingly — this shows how much thought he’s put into the issue, and tells us about Banderas as a dramatist — when it comes to directing Gypsy, he says he has discarded faithful recreations of how spicy Gypsy Rose Lee’s striptease performances were in favour of those that replicate, more accurately, how Lee’s audiences reacted in that era. “The striptease that is performed every night here is stronger than it was in the 1930s,” he says, “so that what I’m showing you, it will make an audience today feel the same impact that probably was felt in 1930 with Gypsy Rose Lee when she just showed her boobies — which was, ‘Woah!’ at that time.”

This is a very courageous movie. It’s proclaiming the freedom of women to do what they want sexually.  

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Passion project

One can only speculate as to what those audiences at New York’s burlesque houses between the wars might have made of the latest movie on Banderas’s C.V., Babygirl. An erotic thriller from the Dutch actress, writer and director Halina Reijn, it stars Nicole Kidman as a high-powered New York chief executive embroiled in an affair with a young intern. It is graphic in the extreme — the film is bookended by orgasms, albeit the first one faked — and Banderas, who plays the story’s Broadway director cuckold, believes the film is all the more powerful for its no-holds-barred depiction of an extra- marital relationship that might be described as consentingly abusive (at one point, at her younger lover’s behest, Kidman’s character licks saucers of milk to the strains of George Michael’s Father Figure).

“The movie is very aggressive,” Antonio says. “Many people watching may think, Whoa, where did this go? She needs to be punished? She needs to be just drinking like a dog on the ground? But no, this is a very courageous movie in the sense that she is the owner of her own life... It’s proclaiming the freedom of women to do whatever they want sexually in a way that actually may contradict some of the information that has come to us in recent years. It’s a movie that is going to make people reflect very much on what the role is that we play in these type of games.”

Banderas says “the whole movie belongs more to Nicole and [co- star] Harris [Dickinson]” — but his role is pivotal when it comes to the broader motifs. “The audience is conscious of this other man who is there with a completely different life to that which she has in her mind,” he says. “And you just realise that people don’t belong to people. You know, we all do have very powerful instincts, animal instincts, that are very difficult to repress, to hide. The movie connects with many people who actually feel like that but are not able to express themselves or not able to just take the step of playing those sexual games because they are dangerous: you have to count on another person, and you don’t know if they are playing with you or what. This is a game of trust... You’re going to a cliff and you don’t know, when you jump, if you’re going to find water or there are going to be rocks down there and you’re going to be killed.”

Babygirl taps into the zeitgeist, addressing the ambiguities woven into sexual relationships in the middle of the 2020s. “In the actual context of the MeToo movement, men have to take a step back to rethink our role in society and with women,” Banderas says. “And not only with women: behaviour with other people, other human beings that we are going to have relationships with... Sometimes we don’t know if it’s appropriate to do things. I have had relationships with women and they have said to me, ‘That’s all you’ve got?’... You know, where are we... it’s very complicated. [People are] not doing things they would do in another time because they thought that was normal. I’m not talking about abusing: abusing is abusing. If you abuse a person, you should pay for that through the law. I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about details, little things.”

Speaking to Vanity Fair before the film’s Venice premiere, Kidman said that shooting the sex scenes in the movie took a toll on her: “It left me ragged. At some point I was like, ‘I don’t want to be touched. I don’t want to do this any more.’ But at the same time I was compelled to do it. Halina would hold me and I would hold her, because it was just very confronting to me.”

Her reflections would have resonated with Banderas, who says of the intimate scenes on camera: “You need to trust the person you’re with. A lot of scenes we have in the movie, we were very gentle with each other, basically, because it’s not fun like [many people think it is]. No, it’s not. You’re working. You’re working, and you want to develop something that makes sense, that is good, that is not bothering the other person. She was gentle. She was a hell of a comrade.

“For me, the whole entire experience was very much about how courageous this woman is, and what quality this woman has. For me, [Kidman’s performance] was a phenomenal act of courage. What an actress, man!” He also has lavish praise for Reijn, whom he compares to Almodóvar: “You’re with somebody who is a real artist, a person that is not hiding anything, that is just taking the steps she had to take in order to say something that is interesting and meaningful for our society, and for her also.”

Homeward bound

Antonio Banderas’s emotional attachment to Málaga, and southern Iberia more broadly, is why one of his most important, most personal portrayals is that of the title character in the National Geographic series Genius: Picasso. “Picasso for me has been a hero since I was born,” Antonio says. “I remember my mother used to take me to school, and every time we passed close to the house where he was born, she always said, ‘Picasso was born in there’.”

Of course, the artist’s legacy is more than a little tainted, and for Banderas this again raises the question of how we negotiate the tides of changing societal values. “With the way he treated women, again, we go back to a guy who was born in the 19th century, when morals were completely different to what we have now,” he says. “The problem with Picasso really was that he’s a guy who was never going to lie to you... If he doesn’t love you, he says, ‘You’ve got to go. This is over.’ That destroyed many lives because people got attached...

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