Gael García Bernal | Page 65 | the Fashion Spot

Gael García Bernal

I just saw Mammoth last night. Gael and Michelle Williams were amazing!

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: New thread here.
 
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Didnt' know there was a thread for him, I love him as an actor. Sad to see there is not posts for 2012

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Dazed & Confused interview:
20 + 20 COVERS PROJECT: GAEL GARCIA BERNAL
PUBLISHED 2 MONTHS AGO

In Dazed's December issue we spoke to the talented actor about London as a source of inspiration and swapping philosophy studies for acting

TEXT BY SIMON JABLONSKI
Exploding onto screens with Amores Perros, with his trademark bright eyes sparkling under a veil of heavy introspection Gael Garcia Bernal has become one of the most consistently adorable and impressive actors of the past decade.

Dazed & Confused: What were you up to twenty years ago?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Twenty years ago I was moving to Mexico City, that was quite a transcendental year, it’s quite transcendental to move to Mexico City. I was twelve, so I was probably at school.

D&C: You were acting at that point as well, weren’t you?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Yeah that’s true, I was already doing stuff I was acting with my parents in the theatre and every now and then I participated in this TV programme in a soap opera in Mexico that was the first and last soap opera I did.

D&C: What was your role?
Gael Garcia Bernal: I was the cute kid with the dog that cried all the time, the dog almost talked.

D&C: What were you like as a twelve year old?
Gael Garcia Bernal: When I was twelve I thought I was a professional actor because my parents were actors and I was already living the life of an actor. I was quite insecure actually, but I wanted to have a laugh and I used to skate a lot.

D&C: Did acting help your insecurities?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Maybe actually the other way round, the insecurity helped my acting I think, especially with theatre because there was something I had to balance. This is going to sound quite romantic, but theatre really is one of the nicest places to be even though you’re completely vulnerable yet for some reason you’re very strong at that point because it’s all about what you can do.

D&C: Had you always aspired to be an actor?
Gael Garcia Bernal: No, there were times I thought I would never be an actor at all. I wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to be an architect, I wanted to be an anthropologist, I wanted so many things but then I ended up studying theatre here in London.

D&C: What prompted the move to London?
Gael Garcia Bernal: When I was studying in Mexico there was a student strike, but I wasn’t studying theatre I was studying philosophy. I came here during the strike, only a few stops from here in Swiss Cottage, there was a school called the central school of speech and drama, and I went there, and that when I went I have to become a professional actor and take it seriously. I was seventeen.

D&C: How did London inspire you?
Gael Garcia Bernal: In a very dramatic and quite miserable way because when you’re a student and you come without money or nothing and there’s a lot of time for your self. That introspection was very creative I guess, I hope. That’s why there are so many great musicians and artists here, there’s a lot of introspection. London was very transcendental. I was living here for 8 years, it was a good period. The last five years I lived in Shoreditch, I saw it change.

D&C: What was Shoreditch like when you were living there?
Gael Garcia Bernal: It used to be a vey communal place, it used to be a place where I would know all the people in the stores there, Spitalfields market was a market and not a mall. Right where I lived there is now an overground station. I used to play football between those platforms. There was something quite unique about Brick Lane, but now it’s so different, it’s changed much.

D&C: Did you have quite a romantic vision of London before you moved here?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Yeah, of course. I’d never been to Europe and I had a very romantic vision. I grew up with a lot of music coming form here, I went to school where a lot of the teachers were from all over England and I have a very romantic vision of it.

D&C: Dazed featured you about ten years ago, how important for your career was it to be supported by the magazine?
Gael Garcia Bernal: It was this magazine that I used to buy and then I just left school and I couldn’t believe it. It was a very funny thing for me to be all of a sudden in the magazine. It was quite meaningful because I was living very close to Old Street and I used to pass around there and see the place and it was amazing. All of a sudden, with that happening, it was really weird, because I just left school one year ago. I don’t know about anyone else, maybe nobody cared, but for me it was amazing. I would see it and I was like, ‘****ing hell man, I’m there!’ It’s really funny, you never expect those things to happen that way, and I never thought I was going to do cinema, so it took me by surprise.

D&C: Was it quite surreal seeing face on the cover?
Gael Garcia Bernal: I don’t know if it was surreal, I don’t know what to call it. All of a sudden it was really funny, maybe absurd, when will they find out that there’s nothing?!

D&C: Is this your insecurity coming out again?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Yes, it always comes out when I least want it to surface.

D&C: What have you learnt most about your art since first appearing in Dazed?
Gael Garcia Bernal: So much has changed since we did the cover, cinema was very different. First of all there were no cameras or mobiles and these great beautiful cameras were not close to existing. And it was a time when films like the Motorcycle Diaries, for example, found a way of getting financed and a few other films that were middle sized films. And all of a sudden now it’s either very very small films or huge films. You realise how cinema, in a way, is once again choked by the industry aspect. You have to convince people that you know what you’re doing. You really don’t know what you’re doing but you have to convince people a lot to put money into your film. And once you manage to do it, sometimes the accident is not a positive one and that becomes quite unfortunate.

D&C: Do you mean you don’t know what you’re doing as an actor?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Oh, as an actor you definitely have no idea. Acting in films you have no idea what it’s going to turn out like at all, you’re the least person to have a clue, it’s the film’s juxtaposing of images that tell a story, that creates something. If you want to be the owner of a character arc as an actor, then you do theatre, that’s where you see it clearly, but in film today we’re shooting this side of the film then the next day you’re shooting the beginning then this and that, then they just put it together and it changes everything that you do, so you really don’t know anything. And I’m fine with that, I love it, I love not knowing, I love trusting the director and thinking, ‘okay that person might not know as well what’s going to happen but at least knows what they want to tell.

D&C: You love the mystery?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Yes I love the mystery

D&C: How have you developed as an actor since first being featured in Dazed?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Well I spent 6 months as a girl after appearing on the cover as Dazed, someone else draw conclusions.

D&C: Career highlights since appearing on the cover?
Gael Garcia Bernal: My biggest highlight is becoming a father. Lázaro, he’s two years and half.

D&C: How has becoming a father affected your attitude?
Gael Garcia Bernal: For those kind of questions I have very common place answers, because they’re really full of meaning now, which is that it’s the best thing that has ever happened to me, to be a father. So just imagine that everything changes: the way I look at things, the way I look at the world, the way I look into the mystery has changed a lot and has become even more profound in a way and it’s more simple in a way.

D&C: Have you consciously tried to stay fresh and relevant throughout your career?
Gael Garcia Bernal: There’s an everyday reinvention you go through, but I might feel a better actor now with a few more experiences, but I might not be a better actor, I might feel I’m better, but I might not be.
dazeddigital
 


Star of such major art-house hits as Y Tu Mamá También, Bad Education, The Motorcycle Diaries, and Babel, Gael Garcia Bernal has spent the past decade chiseling out an impressive résumé of provocative, politically engaged movies that speak to audiences around the world. His latest, Pablo Larraín's No, which debuted this weekend at the Cannes Film Festival, is no exception, recreating the moment when widely feared Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was shockingly ousted during a 1988 referendum by a brilliant marketing man (played by Bernal) who retooled his own soda-pitching prowess to get out the vote.

···
GQ: You're basically a Cannes vet at this point, right? Is this your sixth time?
Gael Garcia Bernal: There must be another time that I came. I think it's the seventh year I've been here.

GQ: Fair to say you're pretty comfortable here.
Gael Garcia Bernal: Yeah. And one thing that is wonderful about this festival is the fact that once the lights come down and everyone's in the cinema, we're all equal. And if the film's a good movie, everyone hears about it no matter what.

GQ: How do you pack?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Well, the first time nobody gave me clothes at all, but now my good friends at Dior send me stuff, and with that I'm sort of good. They give me a tuxedo to wear, and a couple of suits and things. That's fantastic because you can get kicked out if you don't dress up. I've been kicked out once.

GQ: You're kidding. When?
Gael Garcia Bernal: I came to a screening, and I was trying to go in with not a tuxedo suit, but, like, just a jacket and a made-up tie, and they said no. Impossible.

GQ: Fair to say you're not a fan of that aspect of Cannes.
Gael Garcia Bernal: Well, I'm a fan of now, since I'm still caring about those things. But one thing I must mention is that the parties used to be better.

GQ: How so?
Gael Garcia Bernal: When we brought the movie Deficit, we had a party from midnight until eight in the morning. We brought friends from Mexico that played music and everyone was dancing full-on—a complete blow-out. So much fun. God. Deficit obviously didn't win any awards, but the Hollywood Reporter did name us Best Party.

GQ: Distinctive.
Gael Garcia Bernal: I'm very proud of that award. Yeah.

GQ: Let's talk about No. You mentioned how word gets out when there's a good movie, and this is definitely one of those moments. Why do you think people are responding to this film?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Because it's a good one! Its complexity is immense. It's a highly intellectual movie and a very moving film as well. It deals with a universal issue, which is the relationship of a person with politics and power.

GQ: But it's also about using ad language to sell human rights as a product.
Gael Garcia Bernal: Well, there is a clear warning in the film. Because we think that democracy can change a lot of things, but we're being fooled, because democracy is not the election. We've been taught that democracy is having elections. And it isn't. Elections are the most horrendous aspect of democracy. It's the most mundane, trivial, disappointing, dirty aspect of it.

GQ: Because it's turning voting into a commodity.
Gael Garcia Bernal: Every democracy is constructed day-to-day. And the electoral process reduces and minimalizes every single aspect of human complexity. We're putting it into pamphlets. We're doing a publicity show. We're becoming symbols. Let's not give the electoral process so much importance. We have to be cynical about it. Let's give importance to the real democracy that's constructed on a day-to-day basis. That's my hopeful perspective on it. But my realization while I was doing the movie was like, ****, the electoral process is really horrible.

GQ: Are you a politically active person? After all, your daughter's name is Libertad.
Gael Garcia Bernal: Well, fortunately that is a well-known name in Spanish, so it's not like all of a sudden calling someone, I don't know, Mountain.

GQ: But it must have been on your mind somewhere, right?
Gael Garcia Bernal: It was. It was. I mean, it's possibly the best word ever, together with Love. My daughter is incredible and she really symbolizes that.

GQ: At this point, you are such an international star, but you still seem very committed to making films in South America. Is that important to you?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Well, it's important because it's the best place for me to fly—I feel like I can play more roles. I can kind of get a more biological grasp on what's being done and then, I can play around more. In English, I'm a little bit limited. I speak English as a second language, and that's a little limitation that I have to work around and I have to use it to my favor. So, yes, that's why I end up wanting to do more things in Latin America.

GQ: You started acting at a very young age, and starred in a Telenovela when you were a teen in the late '80s. Since No was made with vintage U-Matic video cameras to recreate the visual flavor of the late '80s, was it crazy to see yourself shot on low-grade technology again?
Gael Garcia Bernal: Well, I wasn't aware of the technology when we were shooting the soap opera, since I was very young. But I must say that one great surprise that happened is that before doing this film, we'd talk about how horrible it was to do soap operas and how horrible that video was. But when I saw the movie, I was like, man, isn't it strange how all of a sudden this format seems so nostalgic and filled me with longing for that time. It's just kind of like, wow, this nostalgic feeling—looking at how light comes into the window and everything. It gave me a good feeling. This horrendous video feels so romantic now. Who would have thought?

gq
 
'Who Is Dayani Cristal?' premiere during the 2013 Sundance Film Festival - Park City, Utah - Jan. 17, 2013

tlfan.to
 
The Mexican moviestar's new movie plots the downfall of a dictator. So why is he telling us not to take democracy seriously?

n 1988, 15 years after a bloody coup brought him to power, the Chilean dictator General Augusto Pinochet announced a referendum that was supposed to legitimise and extend his rule. Instead, the people voted him out. Now, in Chile's first film to be nominated for the best foreign film Oscar, No, Mexican star Gael Garcia Bernal plays the leader of a team of advertising men whose populist campaign for the “no” vote helped to bring about Pinochet's fall from power.

A former student at London's Central School of Speech and Drama, Bernal first came to people's attention outside Mexico in the hard-hitting drama Amores Perros and lusty road movie Y Tu Mama Tambien. No is not his first political film. He's played Che Guevara twice, in the TV miniseries Fidel and movie The Motorcycle Diaries, while his directorial debut, Deficit, explored the divisions of class and race in contemporary Mexico. To date, he has steered clear of big Hollywood films. But this is about to change when he takes the lead in 20th Century Fox's post-apocalyptic blockbuster, Zorro Reborn.

Here, he discusses No and the dirty business of democracy.


Can you compare what happened in Chile to the Arab Spring?

Yes. Why I think the film is timeless is because of the involvement of a person in the game of democracy. And the game of democracy is a very disappointing one, if you take it seriously.

Elaborate, please.

You have to accept the fact that there are going to be people who vote different than you, and that is really frustrating. Especially when somebody votes for an idiot. That is the first kind of disappointment. But the other one becomes a long line of disappointments, because democracy deals with pamphlets, with publicity, with one-liners, with a very superficial kind of conversation about the future. I think our involvement nowadays with democracy has this kind of ambiguous feeling, because it doesn't require your complete involvement as it would do in an armed revolution, for example, where you're either on one side or the other, and you can't be in the middle.

Does No say anything about this?

What I take from this movie is that if you see democracy as something a bit less serious than what it seems to be, you get more out of it and you enjoy it even more, and you don't suffer such disappointment.

IF YOU SEE DEMOCRACY AS SOMETHING A BIT LESS SERIOUS THAN WHAT IT SEEMS TO BE, YOU GET MORE OUT OF IT
You were a nine year old in Mexico when the vote happened. Did you know anything about it at the time?

Well I grew up with exiles from all over Latin America that came to Mexico because Mexico was a place that would harbour the dissidents of the dictatorships, as well as other countries in Europe. So I grew up with kids whose parents were involved in something and all of a sudden were living there and became Mexican.

Your fictionalised character in No, Renee Saavedra, has actually come to Chile from Mexico. How does that inform the film?

Although it's not seen in the movie, we can say he becomes a publicist because he lived in Mexico, and Mexico was far more cosmopolitan and much more modern than Chile in those days. Mexico was like this place between the United States but at the same time incredibly Latin American, and very cosmopolitan, and Chile didn't have an outside world, you know?

Did filming No in Chile give you a new perspective on the history?

Meeting exiles in Mexico, you got a sense of the pain that the military coup [that overthrew Salvador Allende and brought Pinochet to power in 1973] provoked. Going to Chile, you see that the pain is still present. It's a pain that will take many years to exorcise, and to find any comfort or justice around. So that is something that I sensed when I got there. It was still very much in the skin of everybody.

YOU SEE THAT THE PAIN FROM PINOCHET IS STILL PRESENT IN CHILE. IT'S A PAIN THAT WILL TAKE MANY YEARS TO EXORCISE, AND TO FIND ANY COMFORT OR JUSTICE AROUND.
Did doing this also bring up feelings of your involvement in the Zapatista demonstrations in Mexico?

No, Saavedra is a foreigner who is at the same time a stranger; he's a character who is alienated a little bit from the place where he is from, a bit existentialist. It is a different involvement that I had when I was a kid. Then you were completely passionate with the hopes. We were wanting to stop the war, basically, and there was no ambiguity in that. We demonstrated and it was a clear goal. And in this case the character is conflicted.”

Renee is an amalgamation of several characters, some of whom actually appear in the film.

What's interesting is that Saavedra is like a mix of three characters, or two characters mainly, Jose Manuel Salcedo and Eugenio Garcia, and these guys played the heads of the campaign of the “Yes” campaign. It is what theatre ultimately does: it is a therapeutic process because the survivors that were the main people that caused this election to be won are portraying the other guys in the film, and what's great is they do it with a certain light-heartedness, to reconcile with the past. A lot of people that are involved with the film did this, and it was a great experience and lovely.

Did they think they had a chance of winning?

No. Salcedo would tell me stuff like, 'I would be very nervous handing in the tape, because I never knew if they were actually going to show it.' Every day they thought, 'They're going to censor us. They're going to take us out. The election is rigged.' They were afraid they were going to disappoint everyone, and themselves as well, because they thought that the election was completely fixed. But it was wonderful when they won.

What happened when they realised they had actually won?

How they celebrated was very interesting. When it was achieved, they were very alone. This guy Garcia, he was a publicist and he had a company, for some reason he took a car and started to drive 400 km north to a desert in Chile, and three days after he sold his company and stopped doing publicity.

No is out now

 
Sorry if repost, but if you want to see something extremely cute... like for example Gael acting at 9 years old, then... here you go! :D :



Btw... what a cute kiss and LOVE that silly long hair in his bangs :lol::blush:
 
Icon Magazine
Ph: Eugenio Mazzinghi
St: Julieta Lopez Acosta


Bernal promotes The Ardor by director Pablo Fendrik, which will be shown during the Cannes Film Festival



thefashionisto.com
 

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