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The son of theater actors, young Gael was often picked for roles in their productions—"playing around," he calls it. "I knew I was supposed to act," he says, "but not as a professional." An improbable chain reaction triggered his career. At 17, he was studying philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico when a strike was called. He decided to take a trip. The cheapest European tickets were to London, so he went there, got a job as a barman and began studying acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Before he graduated in 2001, he took time off to shoot Amores Perros and Y Tu Mama Tambien.
Garcia Bernal attacks each role with ardor and exhaustive research. Preparing to play the young Guevara, he says, "for four months we were reading all the biographies, meeting people that met him, interviewing his family, studying leprosy, studying the economic and political cultures of Argentina and Peru. I went to visit where he was born, to get the blessings of the gods."
In tracing the journey of Guevara from restless child of the upper middle class to abettor of the Cuban revolution, the movie runs into dead ends of sentiment (the little people Che bonds with include a gorgeous leper) and nearly sinks in bathos (he swims a wide river for one last visit to the leper colony). It's all to demonstrate the radicalizing of a guerrilla hero. "We wanted to show where Che came from and where he was going," Garcia Bernal says. "So finding the tone was very delicate, like fine embroidery." Certainly his participation is faultless. He brings to the role a winsomeness and dawning wisdom. Before your eyes, a boy grows into an angry young man.
Garcia Bernal has that boyish quality; even when he dresses up for a film premiere, he looks like a kid in Dad's duds. The child behind the man — that's a theme in Bad Education, in which the main character is a homosexual plotting revenge for his childhood abuse by a priest. The actor playing that character must juggle many identities, and Almodovar saw that ability in Garcia Bernal: "The script demanded someone who would be absolutely desirable both as a woman and as a man, who would be spontaneously virile and not be grotesque when the role was that of a transvestite. From the first tests, Gael was the one who was physically successful in both roles."
Almodovar's tactic, as always, is to put extraordinary creatures in extreme situations while lavishing sympathy on every character, including the evil ones. The actor who'll do anything for a role; the director, an expert at manipulating people; even the priest, who is often as pathetic as he is predatory — all express the film's thesis that love can be a form of abuse and, occasionally, vice versa. Weaving sad headlines about the pedophile clergy into a plot that suggests James M. Cain as filmed by Hitchcock, the film dexterously dances across four time periods and leaves the viewer to determine whether any one scene is reality, memory, fantasy or movies. One thing, however, is certain: nobody makes movies with the brio and gravity of Almodovar's. Bad Education is a cooler film than the director's two recent masterpieces, All About My Mother and Talk to Her, but it's one magnificent melodrama.
Director and star tussled over the approach to the film's "heroine." As Garcia Bernal says, "My inner transvestite is much more Caribbean, and I wouldn't have thought of doing some of the expressions I do in the movie, which are much more Spanish." But whatever the on-the-set spats, the results are spectacular. Whether sporting a macho beard or a cascading blond wig, Garcia Bernal makes his character sexy, annoying ... fully human. Almodovar sees that cocktail of emotions in the actor: "What I like about Gael is that mixture of innocence and passion, tight secrecy and tenderness, sensuality and unconsciousness."
Now he can spread that complicated charisma on a bigger stage — if he wants. "I'm pretty open to work anywhere in the world," he says, "including the United States, of course." He recently made an indie drama, The King, set in Texas, in which he plays William Hurt's son. He is reputed to have turned down some big Hollywood roles, though he won't reveal which ones, "because that's not professional to say." But he is ready for his American close-up and at ease with his impending eminence. "Some things you can control, like the performance you give. But stardom is just a consequence. It's not important, but I am able to enjoy it,"
Whether he enjoys it or not, it looks inevitable for the young man who can do anything.