Y tu hottie también
By Kimberly Chun
HE'S THE ONLY man who could have passed for Che, a delinquent priest, and the most gorg ****** on the block – and now actor Gael García Bernal has done the impossible: he's reduced a set of hardened female ink peddlers, kept waiting in the lobby of a Union Square hotel, into pools of warm goo and fits of schoolkid giggles.
That's the opening shot on this sunlit, shivery, early-November morn as I get goose bumps and feel chicken, sitting on chintz and contemplating the scorchingly hot, sacked-out Bernal running late at 8:30 a.m. and recuperating from a flight from Barcelona. It sounds like just about ... the sexiest thing on Earth, let alone in cinema. He's jet-lagged! Tee-hee! He's 20 to 30 minutes behind schedule! Don't you dare mention the word behind. He's keeping a diary – sans motorcycles! Tee-hee-hee.
Everybody wants him, even our local seen-'em-all, coddled-'em-all film publicist. "He's cute!" she plaintively declares. So he can take his sweet old time – we just want some of that hazel-eyed Guadalajara soul, OK? Stylists with racks of Marc Jacobs duds scurry by, and photographers set up elaborate lighting rigs in adjacent rooms, as I scheme with Bay Guardian shooter Lori Spears about how we're going to get Bernal in bed. For the photo, of course.
And isn't that everyone's fantasy, I wonder, gazing at the short, slim, compact-and-ready-for-action breakout boy of Amores perros and Y tu mamá también and this year's star scene-stealer in Walter Salles's The Motorcycle Diaries and Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education, opening Dec. 22. In The Motorcycle Diaries – as the young medical student who would be Che Guevara, exploring Latin America, discovering its people, and experiencing his first stirrings of conscience – Bernal comes off like the gentle, revolutionary counterpart to that dude in The Passion of the Christ, injecting contemporary naturalism, intelligence, and unpretentious charisma into the icon, and the T-shirt.
To flesh out his portrayal, Bernal homed in on the emerging political awareness of the character. "I actually hate films that compromise visions to appease everyone and make everyone like, 'Oh, this is the Che you wanted to see, you know,' " Bernal says, looking low-key in a dark blue pullover and scrubby hair. "You have to settle for one thing – films work in specifics. You have to work in something incredibly specific, concentrating on this awakening of conscience of the character.... Also, it was about trying to honor the memory of the character, honor the fact that you are who you are thanks to him, for better or worse, because he redefined the 20th century."
In contrast, Bad Education shows Bernal roving through layers of character, portraying an ambitious young actor with more than a secret or two, a ****** beauty, a haunted screenwriter and memoirist, a priestly consort, and a general focal point of desire. The film rides on Bernal's brilliant guises: he's gussied up as a cross between Double Indemnity-era Barbara Stanwyk and Mystic Pizza queen Julia Roberts, and then stripped down to tighty whities by a pool, under the admiring, wary gaze of his director (Fele Martinez). Oscar, the audience, Almodóvar – we're all smitten, ready to buy the fantasy.
And Bernal is happy to oblige, as smiley, articulate, and sharp as the little canines that peep out of the corners of his wide grins, and willing to go to all the places we want to go – for instance, toward the steamed-up sex sorties with hot (and homely) men that stud Bad Education. Rumors, I'll give you rumors.
"I heard that I had problems with the sex scenes," he says, flashing those eyes. Ai-yi-yi. "First of all, it's a bad invention, because it's not true. Secondly, it's like they're not doing their job – it's like doing a review of a book and then inventing things that aren't there. You can see the kind of work I've done, and I've never had an issue, so how can you say I have a problem with the sex scenes?"
"Oh, so they're easy?" I say. As in, easy, sleazy, and fun to picture?
"No! They're not easy – they're as complex as a sex scene can be, but I don't have a problem doing them. I do them full stop. It's not about them being easy or not. They're complex to do – ****ing hell." He slaps his leg in exasperation. "You do it with a girl or a man – it's hard. It's hard."
I blink. Hard.
"It's actually harder if you like the girl. Because you get really nervous." He flashes another big, sweet smile.
Everyone, don't all sigh at once.
Bernal denies published accounts that he clashed with Almodóvar over his accent in Bad Education – reportedly Bernal was miffed that he was told to "clean up" his Mexican pronunciation. "In every creative work, to reach a consensus, there's going to be conflict, and it's normal," he explains in impressive English, which he honed as a teenager in London, where he studied drama. Yet despite his fluency and appeal in the States, Bernal has resisted the siren song of, say, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights and instead made his name in Spanish-language films – a fact, he offers, that says something about his commitment to the cinema of Latin America, where he's hugely popular, and one that makes him the exceptional cover model with a seemingly subtitle-phobic U.S. press. Latino hotel staff do double takes as he indulges photographers' whims with the graciousness of a country music star. Dress like a Charlene Tilton-style strumpet, why not?
The Bad Education part nonetheless involved grooming challenges. "The whole mask requires a big process, the wig and plucking the eyebrows and waxing them, shaving every day, shaving up with a very sharp knife," he recalls. "It almost felt like your head was becoming an orange every day."
The compensation was the opportunity to get swept up in the drag race – an everyday occurrence in Guadalajara, he says, where football players dress as women for monthly matches. "It was the most liberating experience. It was the best thing, not even as an actor, as a human being, to explore that kind of transgendered character that exists in each one of us and to play with that. It's like exploring the clown we have inside, and when you start to explore it, there's a kind of play. It's like exorcising demons, and as they come out, they make you giggle, and they make you enjoy it, and you learn a lot about the human condition and yourself."
Sounds like a ball.
