ANTONIO BANDERAS

INTERVIEW BY Betsy Model

Screen lover, swashbuckler and all-round smolderer Antonio Banderas feels like aging gracefully. Perhaps that’s why he’s putting in some fancy footwork for his new film, Take the Lead.

Smooth Mover

It’s a rare moment when a Hollywood actor or actress blurts out their age—especially without trimming five to 10 years off of it—but it’s rarer still when it’s offered up with humor.

For the record, Antonio Banderas is “thirty-fifteen.” Relaxing at home, the Spanish actor is clearly at ease as he leans forward, laughing, to explain his take on getting older… and getting better.

“You know, I was making jokes about how ‘old’ I was becoming, turning forty-five,” says Banderas, “and Melanie corrected me. She explained to me that I wasn’t really turning forty-five, I wasn’t really in my mid-forties. I was turning thirty-fifteen. You see, it is all,” Banderas laughs, “a state of mind.”

The “Melanie” that Banderas refers to is, of course, actress Melanie Griffith, Banderas’ wife of nearly 10 years, and one of the few actresses in Los Angeles who has spoken out on the fierce competition to stay young in an industry obsessed with beauty. “The pressure is there,” acknowledges Banderas, “and much more so for women than for men. The movie industry is obsessed with ‘fresh fl esh’ and women are constantly under pressure [whereas] men, well, we can perhaps age a bit more gracefully.”

At thirty-fifteen, handsome and trim, Banderas has little to worry about. He’s won 19 international acting awards and has been nominated for another 17, including three Golden Globe nominations for roles in The Mask of Zorro, Evita and And Starring Pancho Villa as Himself.

Banderas’ starring role in Broadway’s Nine The Musical earned him a 2003 Tony Award nomination for Best Actor (Musical) and he’s just received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Banderas has three films due out in the next few months: director Gregory Nava’s controversial, independent film Bordertown, Banderas’ own movie production, El Camino de Los Ingleses and Take the Lead, a movie based on the life of ballroom dancer Pierre Dulaine, who teaches dance in New York’s inner city schools.

That Banderas can keep in step to a tempo is no secret; his role as Guido in Nine The Musical had him dancing on stage with the legendary Chita Rivera, and his roles in films as diverse as Original Sin, The Mask of Zorro, The Legend of Zorro and Evita showed his ability to move seamlessly with either a woman or a sword. Still, Banderas admits, that doesn’t mean that he didn’t need some serious coaching for Take the Lead.

“I can fake that I can dance, that I’m a dancer, and every night [in Nine] I danced a tango with Chita—which was fabulous—but I wasn’t really dancing. She was dancing and I was following,” grins Banderas. “I was blindfolded while I danced with her, and I never dropped her. I fake I can dance as I fake I can swordfight.”

Still, anyone who’s seen the preview for Take the Lead, due out on March 24, might beg to differ; Banderas is as smooth as they come. “The dancing for the movie was quite demanding, and we had very good people doing the choreography. They adapted moves for me that were a bit easier but still looked spectacular.

I mean, after all, I play a dancer who is retired, who is about my age of forty-five,” Banderas smiles, “and not participating in competition anymore but instead is teaching kids who are eighteen. Of course, the kids have something to teach him, too.”

What they impart is how a little urban fl avor—some street moves, hip-hop and a liberal dose of attitude—can give a whole new meaning to one-two-three, one-two-three.

Banderas has more than 70 acting projects on his résumé, and movie and stage projects lined up well into 2008. His prolific career and graceful moves are all the more impressive when you consider that until he incurred a sports injury at the age of fourteen, he was an average teenage boy from Málaga, Spain, who dreamed only of a career playing his beloved soccer.

“I think I was too young to ever really think about playing professionally for the Federation… I played because I loved it. But it’s also true that I wasn’t all that bad,” Banderas smiles, “and I probably could have become a professional soccer player, but I was injured while playing and I broke my left foot in several parts. Now? Now, I am a spectator.”

The year after he broke his foot, the lure of soccer was replaced by the love of acting when Banderas saw a production of Hair. Suddenly, he had a new goal: acting.

Born José Antonio Dominguez Bandera, the eldest son of a schoolteacher and a police comisario, Banderas’ interest in acting and the desire to attend Málaga’s School of Dramatic Art came as a bit of a shock to the traditional Bandera household. He did the requisite classical training which resulted in tours throughout Spain in small productions until 1980, when, at age 19 and with almost no money in his pocket, he moved to Madrid with the intention of getting serious about his career. He joined the National Drama Center in Madrid, worked as a waiter and model to support himself, and anticipated being “the guy in the fifth row holding a sword” for many years to come.

While he did his stints in the fifth row, it wasn’t for long; Banderas’ first big break came from an equally ambitious young director, 10 years his senior, with the name of Pedro Almodóvar. Almodóvar cast the young actor in Laberinto de Pasiones (“Labyrinth of Passions”) in 1982, and allegedly also convinced the young Antonio to add an “s” on to his last name of Bandera.

Banderas learned his English lines phonetically for The Mambo Kings, his 1992 breakthrough American film. The rest, as they say, is cinematic history. Banderas spent the next few years making films like The House of the Spirits opposite Meryl Streep and Jeremy Irons, Philadelphia opposite Tom Hanks and Denzel Washington, and Interview with the Vampire with Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt.

In 1995, Banderas teamed up with Texan filmmaker Robert Rodriguez for the first time. Over the next decade, they collaborated on not only the “El Mariachi” movies—Desperado and Once Upon a Time in Mexico—but on the surprisingly successful Spy Kids movies.

The movies did “…well, very well,” acknowledges Banderas. “I had a lot of fun making these, the kinds of movies that my daughter [nine-year old Stella] can see and enjoy. I like Robert’s creativity.”

“Of course,” Banderas shrugs, “if Robert Rodriguez asked me to go to hell with him, I’d go. There is a relationship there, a friendship, between him and me that makes any job that he’d call me to do something I would do.”

Relationships are important to Banderas and he’s committed to spending quality time with those he holds dear. Besides their daughter Stella, Banderas and Griffith share their homes in Los Angeles, Aspen, New York and Marbella, Spain, with Griffith’s two children from previous marriages, 16-year-old daughter Dakota Johnson and 21-year-old Alexander Bauer.

When teased about being not only bi-coastal but bi-continental, Banderas grins and nods enthusiastically. Los Angeles is about movie work, Melanie’s career and the children’s school year, he explains, while Aspen is all about winter recreation. His home on the Costa del Sol, Spain, is about exhaling, resting and laying low in the country of his birth, while New York is home to Broadway and the stage—“the real true love, you know, of my career”—and he and Griffith hope to retire there.

If hearing Banderas talking about future retirement feels slightly odd, he makes it clear that it’s New York’s very energy that he’s enamored of and clamoring for. He lived in New York briefl y when he first came to the United States as a young, unknown actor and his affinity for the city is unmistakable.

“For me, New York is the most European city in America. Los Angeles is like a movie set—you can’t believe anything… it’s all exaggeration! In New York, things are straightforward.”

Straightforward, Banderas says with a smile, rather like being thirty-fifteen…