Antonio Banderas Opens Up About His Heart Attack, Aging And Playing A Very Old Friend In Pedro Almodóvar’s Latest Film (2024)

Two and a half years ago, Antonio Banderas suffered a heart attack. He was only 56 at the time, and in otherwise excellent health. It came as a complete surprise. Now 59, athletically lean and as productive as he’s ever been, Banderas said “it’s one of the best things that’s happened in my life. It opened my eyes to understand myself better, to understand my role in life, and to just realize the things that are really important.”

“There’s a bunch of stupidities that I considered important before that just disappeared, that just sunk,” he said. “Something changed.”

Pedro Almodóvar, the Spanish film director with whom Banderas had made seven films at the time, saw the change immediately. “He said, ‘I don’t know how to describe it, but after you had this heart attack, there’s something in you. I don’t know how to describe it, but I want you to not hide it.’”

This fall, Banderas can be seen starring in two very different films, Steven Soderbergh’s film about the Panama Papers, The Laundromat, and Almodóvar’s muted, semi-autobiographical Pain and Glory. He was in New York last week to introduce the latter at the New York Film Festival, and we sat down to talk about that project, aging, his approach to acting and his thoughts on playing gay characters dating back to one of his first collaborations with Almodóvar more than 30 years ago, 1987’s Law of Desire.

In Pain and Glory, Banderas plays a partially fictionalized version of Almodóvar himself: a film director named Salvador Mallo in the midst of physical and psychological decline, who turns to heroin to help numb his myriad pains, both corporal and existential. It was their eighth film together, and the two have known one another for 40 years. Banderas said that level of intimacy created both challenges and opportunities.

“It’s slightly more difficult to play somebody who existed, it’s a little more difficult if that person is still alive because he’s still [creating things], it’s more difficult if that person is your friend, and it’s still more difficult if that person is directing you,” he said. “But at the same time, you have right there all the data you need to put together a character.”

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To do this, Banderas said he “had to kill Antonio Banderas. I had to kill that guy who’s more athletic, more romantic, and create the character from another point of view.” In the process, he said, he discovered he could express volumes with just a look, or a gesture. “We could create a character with little things,” he said, “like embroidering something, little by little, with subtleness.”

For Banderas, such attention to detail is essential to good acting. “You invite the audience to travel with you,” he said of the craft. “If you try to get manipulative with them, if you try to drive them too much, you lose them.”

While Banderas bears few superficial similarities to Almodóvar, he recognizes that we all share certain universal qualities. “What are we?” he asked, allowing the question to linger for a beat. “Are we the things we have done, the things we have said? Or are we also the things we wanted to do and never did, the things we wanted to say and never said? We are all of it.”

In Pain and Glory, there is a heartbreaking scene in which Salvador is talking with his mother, Jacinta (Julieta Serrano), well into her 80s, and he apologizes for not being the son she expected him to be. He is alluding, in part, to being gay, but also an artist, a city dweller and, presumably, a non-believer. “Pedro probably never said that,” said Banderas of the director, “but he wanted to say it. Everybody travels through life with a suitcase full of mysteries and greatnesses. Everybody. Pain and glory. Unless you know somebody who is perfect.”

Almodóvar, who is 70, had never made such an autobiographical film before, though the director’s preferred term autofiction better describes the project. It draws heavily from the director’s life, but takes liberties as well. Banderas suggested that age may have motivated him to make the film now. “You have a number of directors who, at a certain point in life, just want to look inside,” he said, citing Frederico Fellini’s 8 1/2 and Francoise Truffaut’s Day for Night as precedents.

He added that, for him, playing Almodóvar presented a similar opportunity for self-examination. “There is a moment in your life when you start looking back. There is a moment in anyone’s life, when you are getting older, which leaves only space for the truth.”

While Banderas might attribute this to age, a search for truth has defined his career from the start. He played gay characters at a time when not many mainstream actors were comfortable taking such roles, but notes today that a character’s sexual orientation “has never been a main thing” for him. “It’s just one of the features of the characters among many others,” he said.

When he played Tom Hanks’s boyfriend in Philadelphia, for instance, Banderas said his priority was simply to be true to the character, to do what the character would do, feel what the character would feel–regardless of how it might be received by audiences. “There was a scene in which I was running to the hospital because [Hanks’s character] had a crisis, and it’s when they discover that he had AIDS,” he recalled. “And it was written in the script that we have to embrace. And I think it was in the second or third take that I said, ‘Man, this is f***ed up, we have to kiss, man. We are a couple, we are couple. We have to kiss.’”

It was a bold suggestion–the director, Jonathan Demme, hadn’t even thought of it–but Banderas said that Hanks readily agreed. That kiss, 26 years ago, became a defining moment in American cinema. “It was very stupid because it was a very little kiss,” said Banderas, looking back, “but it was so important.”

For Banderas, the greatest irony is that violence on film gets a pass. “You can kill anybody on the screen and it’s totally fine, it doesn’t create any kind of problem,” he said. “People just love that. You can kill people in movies for kids, you can see blood in those movies, and it’s fine. But if you kiss another person of the same sex, it’s like [gasp!], like the whole entire world is just going to dissolve.”

We ended with a discussion of how Pain and Glory depicts Salvador’s opiate use, and whether that depiction is ethical. Salvador seems to put it down just as easily as he picked it up, and withdrawal is discussed only in passing. Banderas answered that he doesn’t think it should be taken literally, but rather as a metaphor. “He uses the drugs as an analgesic, in a state of desperation,” he said, and it shows that he “could be very self-destructive.” But more importantly, it’s used as “almost a parallel line to the real addiction–and the real addiction is to cinema, to telling his stories.” Once Salvador feels motivated to work, he no longer needs the drug.

“So in a way, the movie is very hopeful,” Banderas concluded, noting a scene towards the end of the film when Salvador is about to undergo surgery and tells his doctor that he is writing again. “It’s a way of him saying, ‘Don’t kill me, I still have things to do.’”

It is, indeed, a moving line. And Banderas delivered it straight from the heart.

Pain and Glory opens on Friday, October 4th.

Antonio Banderas Opens Up About His Heart Attack, Aging And Playing A Very Old Friend In Pedro Almodóvar’s Latest Film (2024)

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