The actor on meeting Stephen Sondheim, staging “Godspell” for the Pope, and the thrill, in the new Anthony Bourdain bio-pic, of playing someone “good.”
I saw “Tony,” the new bio-pic about Anthony Bourdain, earlier this summer, at a private screening attended largely by people in the world of hospitality and food media, many of whom, myself included, knew the real Bourdain. Food people are normally a raucous, emotive bunch, but there was a tightness in the air as folks arrived and took their seats. Pretty much everyone in the room admitted, in murmurs and whispers, that we were nervous about the film—that it would be superficial, or dehumanizingly hagiographic, or else just sort of clunkily bad, in the way that bio-pics often are, relying overmuch on a viewer’s knowledge of who the movie’s subject was and would become. But the director of “Tony,” Matt Johnson, wisely constrains his story—loosely based on a few early chapters of “Kitchen Confidential,” with its narrative arc fairly fictionalized—to one mid-seventies summer. We follow a college-age Bourdain as he bums around Provincetown, trying to be a writer and working his first kitchen job, and the result turns out to be a sharp, intelligent film. (“It’s a bildungsroman,” a nerdily angelic, beautifully stupid young Tony explains to a panel of white-haired professors in the movie’s opening scene, petitioning for funding for a novel he plans to write. It sure is, kid.)
The movie—which comes out August 7th—is a star turn for Dominic Sessa, who plays the young Tony with adenoidal swagger. But the most extraordinary thing on the screen is Antonio Banderas, who delivers an astonishing, devastating performance as the proprietor of the restaurant where Bourdain finds work, and on whose porch Tony ends up sleeping for the summer. Chef—the character is nameless, and seemingly unknowable—is a mentor and a foil to Tony, his lined face and graying beard highlighting Tony’s youth, his composure framing Tony’s jittery ambition. Chef is unbothered by his kitchen staff fighting, yelling, stealing, and openly doing drugs, but he draws the line at any blasphemous utterance of the Lord’s name, and he makes Tony join him at church every week as a condition of his ongoing residence in Chef’s hammock. Banderas has been, for well over thirty years now, one of our most bombastic, most movie-star movie stars, whether he’s brandishing a period-accurate rapier or succumbing to Almodovarian psychodrama. In the very human-scale role of Chef, all that glamour and pageantry seethes just beneath the skin. The movie doesn’t shy away from letting Tony make mistakes—at times, the character edges toward outright villainy—and Banderas animates Chef with a contrasting moral clarity whose force feels almost physical.
Yes! But life is such a bitch, because we won the World Cup and, immediately after, we had these wildfires in Madrid, in Castellón, all around Spain, so the people couldn’t have the time to just enjoy the victory immediately. Sometimes you just want to ask, “Give me at least a month to enjoy this.”
Where did you watch the game?
In my theatre. In the summertime, we stop performances so we can do repairs in the theatre, but the last thing we did, this season, was a concert by our symphonic orchestra that was all Gershwin: “Rhapsody in Blue,” “An American in Paris,” and the suite of “Porgy and Bess.” And I don’t just put the orchestra there and they play; I put screens—we had this fabulous footage that we found of Gershwin himself in Boston, 1935, directing the first performance of “Porgy and Bess.” So that was the last thing that we did for the season, and the screens were still there. So for the World Cup final I called all my workers and their families and friends, and we filled the theatre with people and we watched the final here. Imagine! It was unbelievable!
It was a hell of a game.
Spain plays very good, but . . . How can I explain this? There is union. There is actually a lot of generosity between players. There are no superstars in the Spanish team. Spain was always called the Fury, but they didn’t play with fury, they played with the head and they played softly, and they literally cancelled an amazing team like Argentina who couldn’t do anything—they didn’t even shoot once during the first ninety minutes of the match. Spain’s players have been playing like that since they were five years old; they can play blindfolded and they know where they are, perfectly, at any given time. They were confident in themselves.
In a way, that’s what my character in “Tony” is asking the kids in the kitchen to do: to play unified, with no drama. It’s very difficult, because the drama appears sometimes—I get punched in my mouth in the movie, because I’m telling a guy not to do what he’s doing. But society’s like that sometimes, too. We are proud of our team, we Spaniards, and we are asking everybody to play like that: our government, our institutions, everybody just to play calm and with wisdom.
And then for Trump to be the one to hand them the trophy and to try to insert himself into the photo is so—
I remember the Spanish captain going, “Please, we have to make the picture.”
“You’re not on the team.”
You know, in Spain, really, he was not highly criticized for that. It was just a laughing matter. It was funny. It was actually funny to see.
It must be a little surreal for you. You grew up in the Franco regime, and to see things of a similar shape happening in American politics—does that bring out any echoes for you?
Well, they are different characters. Franco came from a completely different background. Franco was never elected democratically, and Trump was elected democratically. And, whether you like it or not, that is a fact. And those facts should be respected. That is a very important thing. Sometimes I have the impression that we are living in a post-democratic state of mind, worldwide, in which the guys who access power democratically, they try to take the law and bend it, they try to colonize these institutions that are supposed to be impartial to extend the time in which they can be in power. We are in dangerous times—we are not just playing with ideologies, we are playing with the system itself. This is a new game.
When you were a student, you were arrested by Franco’s police for performing in plays that were considered too inciting and too radical for the public—
It was very funny. My father finished his life being a sheriff in Málaga, but at the time he was in the secret police.
Oh.
A theatre group in Barcelona had been arrested—they did a play in which they were against La Guardia Civil, the guys with the hats. And so we were protesting, in a performance, in a theatre here in Málaga called Teatro María Cristina. I remember, out of the side of my eye, I could see something shiny in the wings of the theatre, and I didn’t know what it was. I was suffering a lot on the stage, with my face painted like Marcel Marceau, with painted-on tears, I had ropes tied around my arms, somebody was hitting me, there was very dramatic, percussive music—I felt very absurd. After the curtain goes down, it turns out that the thing that was shining was the helmets of the cops. They put us on the ground, they handcuffed everybody, and when I got to the police station I see my father, and he sees me. At the beginning, of course, he couldn’t recognize me, with my strange costume and this painted white face. He says, “What are you doing here?” And I say, “Ask this guy who arrested us all.” He took me aside and said, “O.K., clean yourself. Go home.” And I said, “I cannot go home and leave my pals here! They’re not going to accept me, they will kick me out of the group. So you have to release all of us.” So they released all of us. It was raining in Málaga that night, and we were walking on the street going back to the theatre. We were all painted and in costumes.
At the time, the regime was dissolving. There was not really an interest to continue with Franco’s regime, or whatever he left behind. The country wanted to be democratic. Finally, forty years after the civil war in Spain, the country wanted just to get together with Europe, to be part of the European Union, to be free. So that’s exactly what happened. They legalized every party, and there was a moment of pardon from everybody to everybody. That was beautiful—the Transition. Still, now, we remember how beautiful those days were: everything exploded in color and in freshness. Nobody was talking about the past anymore, everybody was talking about the future and the country went boom. We were very proud to be called Spaniards.
Do you still have that instinct to do things that are forbidden, or to needle the people telling you what you can and can’t do?
Our profession—and when I say our profession, I suppose that I am trying just to say all artists, whether it can be a scenic artist, movie stars or painters, musicians, whatever—I think we have a certain responsibility, but we also have to be very careful. Our profession has many different purposes: people make movies to make other people laugh; people make movies to make people think and reflect; other people, they want to do a political statement. And why not? In a free country, you should be able to do that and not be fearful. But it is one thing to make a piece of art, and another thing to make a pamphlet. You have always to be very smart, and not abandon what we are: we are artists.
Do you think it’s a young-person thing—that this kind of courage and this intensity are products of youth?
Yeah, of course, the impetuousness and the force that young people have has to be expressed some way. But then there are other forces in people who have experience, that should get in the game, too. Probably I am saying this to you because I am going to be sixty-six in a couple of weeks and I have to defend my new position as an old man.
When you’re working with a younger actor, like with Dominic Sessa, in “Tony,” do you see yourself?
Yes, sometimes I do. Not in his mistakes, because he’s great. That’s something that you have or you don’t have. It’s like how kids are fantastic actors when they are playing games; if you are a cowboy, you are a cowboy, and you’re completely there, right? But, yes, I see the strength, the impulse to go somewhere. And that is actually very beautiful to see. I remember beautiful moments in my career, like the day that we opened a certain movie and I felt people laughing—that is very beautiful in a difficult profession like ours. So when you see it in a young actor, it’s the excitement of seeing a place I have been, and seeing the path that he has to go now through. The people that he’s going to know, the problems that he’s going to face, the obstacles, the this, the that. Life!
Do you give young actors advice?
It is difficult to give advice. I only give advice if they ask. And even then, I don’t know—really, I’m not doing an exercise of humbleness or anything like that, it’s just complicated. When I am directing actors—and I am doing that now more than before, because I direct a lot of theatre—the only thing that I say to my actors is, “I am not smarter than you. I am not more intelligent than you. But I have an advantage over you: I am seeing you from the outside.” But that’s not advice, that’s direction. And I may say to an actor, “Try. I don’t know if I’m right. I think I am, but you have to try it, and I have to see it. And then you tell me how you feel, and I will tell you what I see from you.” I don’t like to obtain results from an actor by bending him and making him suffer. I think it can actually mess up careers, and people, and it’s very easy to do that. So when you are directing, when you are advising: Careful, careful.
The thing is, I have learned more about acting by directing than by acting. Directing, you see the problems from the outside continuously, so when you get in there as an actor, you remember what you have seen before.
You’ve spoken in the past about your work with Pedro Almodóvar: you’ve said he “made” you, he “created” you. What does it mean to be made by somebody?
Pedro Almodóvar is very representative of a time in which Spain was changing. He had the balls to jump in and propose things that were unthinkable just a very few years prior to that. When I got into the world of Almodóvar, I didn’t always like what he was proposing to me. But, at the same time, I remember my teachers—I had an Argentinean teacher of corporal expression, fantastic, who used to say to me, “Your life, your prejudgments, all of that—when you are acting, you just take it off like a jacket, and you leave it outside of the room. If you wear the jacket onstage, then you’re not going to be an actor. You’re going to be always resisting.” So, with Almodóvar, I let myself go into what he was proposing to me, and I tried to understand these universes that were not mine. And so, in a way, when I say he made me, I say he made me think in a different way. He made me understand the world in a different way. He made me be more expansive, be bigger, to understand others.
Have you made anybody?
I don’t think so, because I am not Almodóvar. Almodovar is probably the most faithful man to himself that I have met in my life. He’s very difficult. The only time that Almodóvar has jumped into something that was not supposed to be him was “The Room Next Door,” the movie that he did with Tilda Swinton and Julianne Moore, which is the one done in English. He was terrified, I think, because he loses control when he’s working in another language—even if he speaks the language, he doesn’t have all of his tentacles into the game. But the rest of the time, every other film, he was so faithful. He never betrayed his ideas, and that is priceless nowadays. I don’t know if I am like that—among other things, because I didn’t have that impulse of creativity dedicated to one very specific thing. He is almost like a boat, always going in the same direction, exploring the same things that interest him in the same way. And I am not like that. I am an interpreter. “Zorro” doesn’t have anything to do with “Pain and Glory.” “Puss in Boots” doesn’t have anything to do with other movies that I have done in Europe. So what I like about me, if you will, versus what drives Almodóvar, is that I am an actor. I am many.
Now that I am directing, I am discovering other things, too, though more to do with theatre than with movies. I love theatre for the value of theatre itself—not as literature, as theatre. I love the wink of an eye to the audience to break the fourth wall, I love to play with them. It’s very intoxicating to me when I direct a play with the audience and the actors at the same time in different planes.
I did notice that the shows that you’ve staged—“Company,” “A Chorus Line”—are shows about storytelling and performance.
There are two things. One: I wanted to do shows that I would’ve loved to do, but that it was absurd for me to do in America. I cannot play [the “Company” protagonist] Bobby. Bobby is American! I cannot do Bobby there, but I can do Bobby here, translated, as I can do Hamlet in Spanish. In England, they can do “Life Is a Dream,” by Calderón de la Barca, in English. But if I do Bobby in America, people will say, “Yeah, but you’re not a New Yorker in the way that Bobby is.” So that’s one thing. And then, yes, you are right: I love theatre reflecting theatre. “Chorus Line” is an audition. The whole entire play is an audition. And we did “Gypsy,” which again is about the theatre. We did some minor shows like “They’re Playing Our Song,” which is also about a musician and a lyricist falling in love. And now I am going to go for “Sweeney Todd,” which is another endeavor, and I’m going to do it in a very specific way that I should be cautious to talk about, but it’s going to be very spectacular.
You really love Sondheim!
I had this thing with Stephen, when I was doing “Nine” on Broadway. He came one day to see the show, and afterward we had a conversation—I had a dressing room with a sofa and we just sat there and started talking, talking, so long that they almost closed the theatre. He said to me something that, at the time, I thought, Why is he saying this to me? He said, “When you direct one of my shows, look under the stones.” I said, “Well, I don’t know if I’m going to direct theatre.” I was more into directing movies—I had directed “Crazy in Alabama,” and then I did a movie in Spain. And then, many years after I got this theatre in Málaga, and I’m doing “Company,” he sent me a letter and said, “You can change the age of the characters. You can change this and that, and this and that. But don’t change the structure. And remember what I said to you: look under the stones.”
I did slightly change the structure, and lawyers had to come from America to see if they approved what I was doing. So they watched it and they came to my dressing room right after and I was shaking, believe me, because if they didn’t like it, they could have taken the whole entire performance down. But they said, “O.K., Antonio, you have our permission to put this on video. Stephen has to see this. It’s phenomenal.” Because it was COVID time. He was ninety-one years old. He didn’t want to get on a plane. And the next day, he died, so he never saw it. The movie of life always finishes the same way.
What was the structural change you made in the show?
Basically, the actors are on the stage the entire time, like in a Spanish rumba. They sit down around the stage, they just come up and play those trios, and then back to the seats where they have all the props that they need. It was very cinematic. And at the beginning of the show, the only one that is out there is Bobby: he is sitting down, reflecting. I put a black scrim behind me, that had a projection. I’d filmed the actors before, in a rehearsal, getting on the stage looking lost, like “Six Characters in Search of an Author,” the Pirandello. The real actors on the stage are exactly at the same size that the projection is showing. So the people in the audience have no idea what they are watching: an actor, a projection? Bobby, in my production, is fifty, and he’s reflecting about all of those girlfriends who now are not there anymore. All of those five married couples—they’re not there anymore. He’s just alone. The whole show is just him and alcohol, basically. It’s all in his mind. I sang “Being Alive” totally drunk every night. The people got really emotional when they were there. Because they saw themselves.
In the time we have left, I think we should talk about God.
Yes!
“Tony” seemed to me to be so much about sin and trespass and forgiveness and mercy. There’s a lot of drugs and lies and mess. Your character, the Chef, seems to be the story’s one unambiguously good man. How do you play goodness?
I never thought about that: to play somebody who is good. Sometimes I feel guilty that I play violent characters—I have to tell you, I always thought, Oh, it’s just a comic book. It’s not real. Real violence is different. But then I see sometimes the effect that the violence of movies has produced in people, especially in young people. And I thought, Oh, no. So maybe that’s something that comes with age, too. But it’s true that portraying a character that exudes good things, that exudes principles, produces the sensation that you have done something. So it’s nice that you saw that in the character, because it’s true. There is a moment of deception, in the film, where he thinks that he’s doing exactly the right thing for this kid, for Tony, and the kid says, “No, I don’t want to be like you.” This is a moment when the Chef feels very small; he feels, “Oh, my God, I’ve been wrong the entire time.” But it’s not exactly like that. There is a lesson that the kid teaches me: we all have our lives and it doesn’t matter who you are—all your titles that you got in New York, cooking at the Culinary Institute of America, and you’re a great cook and you have a life, but it’s not my life.
The real Anthony Bourdain was a cook, but he was foremost a writer. If you see his shows, they were about people—people in different environments, in different countries, in different cultures. He was using cooking as a pretext to talk about people, and using people to talk about life, and using life to talk about himself. I remember just getting caught by him on television—I was doing something and suddenly I got caught by this guy. Not by the food; I didn’t give a shit about the food. It was what he was telling me about Indonesia or Japan or Spain or South Africa. The importance of this particular herb and this particular salt. It was different from what we were doing in Spain, but also it was us. The cooking is cooking. What he was doing was something different.
A few months ago you staged “Godspell” for the actual Pope, who was visiting Madrid. I want to know everything about that.
O.K., this is what happened. I took “Godspell” and I made the characters a troupe of actors, and I put them in a ruined church in the middle of a war. The show starts with bombing in the background, kaboom, and a discussion among them about what to do. Jesus comes out, and he says “I’m an actor, too.” And every time that he had to say something very Biblical, he goes to the person, like he’s rehearsing, and says [taps his fingers like someone trying to recall something] ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta, just remembering his lines and then saying the line. So the audience is all the time in and out, unsure what is performance. Then the second act is way more straightforward: the troupe are now doing the show; now they believe who they are.
The Bishop of Málaga came to see the show, and after he said, “I am tempted to say that what I saw was heretical, so that many people will come to see it.” I said, “What do you mean by that?” He said, “That I loved it. Can I go again?” So he came again. And then we took the show to Madrid, and the Cardinal of Madrid came, and at the end of the show came to me and said, “I would like for you to do a performance of this to the Pope, just a medley. And then I want you to write something to say to the Pope. Do you have something to say to the Pope?” And said, “I don’t know!” He was, like, “You’ll have something to say to the Pope.”
So what did you say?
The day that I gave my speech, which was in front of twelve thousand people, was the day after the little performance of “Godspell.” He said, “I loved what you guys did yesterday. I know very well that play, because I am American.” When I finished my speech, I put my paper down and said, “Holy Father, I’m here because of ‘Godspell,’ and ‘Godspell’ in Spanish is encanto de dios, the God spell. And I have to confess that I am here today because I felt the spell of God.”
He was a good man. He was a humble man, very intelligent. And the way that he spoke in the Spanish Parliament was fantastic. Fantastic. He did a great job over there. In the little time that I had with him, I was very impressed. Not every day you have the opportunity to just read something that you wrote to a Pope. And they didn’t kill me!
A rave from the Pope! How do you know when the work is actually good?
More than by the reaction of the people, I know by myself. The day of that performance in front of the Pope, there were people that opposed it. The Church has many different factions, and God is a subject that people try to kidnap, to reduce to something for themselves: God has to be like we are, to dress like this, to behave like this. But I see in my own view something way, way wider than that. People are sometimes like me, and many times are not like me. ♦
