As a reason for keeping an interview on schedule, Antonio Banderas’ is, at the very least, original. “There is a storm coming,” he says, “and I want to get ahead of it.” Above us, the sun streaming through the atrium of Munich’s Hotel Bayerische Hof suggests otherwise, but the Spaniard has a look as ominous as the dark clouds he foresees. “The rain comes down from the Alps and then the airport closes. Always happens here.”
Three decades of international movie stardom and the air miles that come with that may have given him a sixth sense for travel-disrupting weather, but even Banderas could not have predicted that, in 2019, turning 60 next year, he would be in the prime of his acting life.
This month, following its rapturous reception at the Cannes Film Festival, where Banderas was named Best Actor, he appears in Pain and Glory, director Pedro Almodóvar’s latest, in which the actor plays a film director modelled closely on the great auteur himself. (Banderas is in Munich to present the movie at the city’s film festival and also to receive an award for his body of work.)
Much has been made of exactly how much of Almodóvar is in Salvador, Banderas’ character — is this fiction or straight autobiography? — and to what extent one of the storylines reflects their own shared history: the story of a director reconnecting with a former star years after shunning him at the height of their early success.
Between 1982 and 1989, Banderas and Almodóvar made five films together, establishing themselves individually and as a pair, as a Spanish Scorsese and De Niro. They then didn’t work together again for 22 years, until 2011’s The Skin I Live In. This long separation was attributed to Almodóvar’s supposed disapproval of Banderas having gone to work, and then live, in Hollywood.
“Between us, it wasn’t so dramatic [as it is in the film],” Banderas says, clapping his hands dramatically. “We have always been friends and [not working together] was more a game than anything else. He was playing with me a little bit, maybe a little bit jealous of certain things I did in America. There is a big element of trust in acting, in the people who you are with, and I lacked that trust with him, but I was wrong. We have confronted each other in the work, and we are so in rhythm now. Working on Pain and Glory was very emotional.”
Banderas’ current moment in the sun — he was an excellent Pablo Picasso on TV last year in Genius — is something of a turnaround from recent years. He has worked steadily since his heyday as a Hollywood heartthrob in the Nineties — Zorro, Puss In Boots in the Shrek films, as well as starring for Woody Allen, Steven Soderbergh and Brian de Palma — but his recent CV does not contain many films that have troubled festival juries.
In 2017 alone, he played in five action-thrillers, three shot in Bulgaria and none coming to a cinema near you (unless you live in Lithuania). Prior to these roles, he had turns in Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups, The Expendables 3 and The 33, as the head of the Chilean miners who spent 69 days trapped underground.
“Let me explain about the concept of ‘a career’,” he says, leaning in and putting his hand on Esquire’s knee. “When I went to America, and my first movies were successful, my agents, everybody, told me not to get away from what the audience wants. ‘You have to take care of your career.’ But I said, ‘I don’t want to have “a career”’. I really enjoy doing many different things. But I paid a price, of sorts, because I didn’t follow the path I was supposed to follow. I am an actor, and that’s it, period.”
Well, an actor and an accomplished salesman, too. He has the longest-running celebrity fragrance deal of anyone except for Elizabeth Taylor. There are 22 Banderas fragrances on the market, 13 for men and nine for women, in this, the 22nd year in which they have been available. “I sell more bottles of cologne in Russia than any other brand,” he says, and it’s not hard to imagine young thrusters from Saint Petersburg to Vladivostok spraying one of his fragrances, perhaps Secret Temptation, in a little three-spritz Zorro “Z” on their freshly scrubbed necks.
Which one is he wearing today?
“Power,” he says, shortening Power of Seduction in the way that its regular wearers would. He then tugs the neck of his duck-egg blue, short-sleeved shirt, a polo with a grandad collar. “This is mine too.” He is working with Ecoalf, an ethical fashion brand, on a sustainable clothing line yet to be launched. For his previous clothing line, with Danish firm Selected Homme, he took modules in menswear at Central Saint Martins, alma mater of Alexander McQueen.
“I don’t just want to give my name and image to something,” he says. “I like to put the work in. I go to the perfumists and they have taught me; they are artists. It’s so interesting. I like to learn, and to do. Especially since my heart attack [January 2017; three stents]. It made me realise that there really is only one life.”
He pauses, sips his rooibos tea and stares across the hotel lobby for a long moment. “I’m sorry,” he says, “but I really have to catch my plane home.” He is flying into Farnborough airport and then heading into leafiest Surrey, where he has lived for the last four years, just outside the village of Cobham, with his girlfriend, a Dutch investment banker. They wanted somewhere good for Spain and New York, with lots of theatre, and after living in West London for a while, they found the stockbroker belt.
It’s an unexpected and incongruous image, the Spanish stallion roaming genteel Cobham High Street. But Banderas says it works for him.
“No one there cares about who I am, really. I go to the shops, in Horsham or wherever, and nobody bothers me. Sometimes someone nice will say, ‘Hey, Banderas!’” he says, in a decent plummy accent, “‘happy to have you hair-air!’” Then he bursts out laughing.
You would forgive him chuckling to himself again a few hours later, in his aeroplane seat, thinking of the rest of us back at Munich airport, watching the delays mount up and the rain lash the massive departure lounge windows.
Pain and Glory is out now.
Like this article? Sign up to our newsletter to get more articles like this delivered straight to your inbox
