Gael García Bernal is a man with a plan: ducking the Hollywood lifestyle for family time in Mexico and working on films that promote new talent and stir his soul, like his latest, Blindness
“My twenties was just a rehearsal,” announces Gael García Bernal, sitting opposite me in a hotel suite in Cannes. The Mexican star of Babel and The Motorcycle Diaries turns 30 two days after the UK opening of his new film, Blindness, and he’s already thinking about how to celebrate: a three-part party, one bash for each decade. “I want to do it in three places: in Guadalajara, in Mexico City and in Havana, Cuba.” Raised in the first location and based in the second, why does he also want to take in Cuba? “Why?” he says, fixing me with those intense green eyes. “Doesn’t it sound great?”
Fair point. What’s more, if you were Bernal, you’d probably have a fair bit to celebrate. He’s already worked with some of the world’s finest directors, from France’s Michel Gondry (The Science of Sleep) to Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar (Bad Education). Now he can add Fernando Mereilles to that list. The Brazilian director behind The Constant Gardener, Meirelles’ latest is a faithful adaptation of the novel by Nobel Prize-winning writer José Saramago. It tells the story of an outbreak of ‘white blindness’ that hits an unnamed city, leaving victims to be herded off to an abandoned asylum to fend for themselves.
An allegory for the way modern society has become ‘blind’ to all its troubles, coming across as somewhere between an apocalyptic tale and an anthropological study, it was the allure of the book that reeled Bernal in. “I was 19 when I read it,” he recalls. “It was one of those books that everyone read. Regardless of how pretentious you were when you were a teenager, you acknowledged that this book was incredible.” In other words, working with Meirelles and such Hollywood stars as Julianne Moore and Mark Ruaffalo, who plays a couple afflicted by the epidemic, was something of a bonus.
Nevertheless, when Bernal was first approached, he had no idea which role he was being considered for – until he was told it was the so-called ‘King of Ward 3’. A far cry from playing Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, it’s arguably the most evil person he has ever played. Yet despite him brutalising fellow sufferers in the asylum, “it would be very wrong to have a moral judgement on the character,” says Bernal. “This is not like being the antagonist to the superhero. It’s not a story about guys like that. It’s about the human condition.”
Proving Bernal has never been one to be concerned about his image, it also shows he has serious artistic ambitions. In 2005, he formed Canana Films with his lifelong friend – and co-star of Y tu mamá también – Diego Luna. A production company geared towards promoting Mexican filmmakers, artists and musicians, “it was just about creating a space for expression and that’s what Canana became,” according to Bernal, who directed his first project, Déficit, in 2007. “It’s about doing films that are making no business at all, but they’re allowing a voice to be heard. And in the future, these voices are going to be terribly important. So it just feels incredibly natural to do this.”
Read the full interview in our December 2008 edition.