Antonio Banderas Knows About the 'Assassins' Computer GIF

Antonio Banderas knows how we've turned him into a meme.

October 2, 2019

We've all seen it at this point. Antonio Banderas sees something good on a computer, leans back in his chair and places his fist to his mouth in satisfaction. It's a reaction GIF with few competitors in terms of both its expressiveness and ubiquity. And Banderas himself is fully aware of his contributions to online communication.

The actor got the chance to talk about the GIF from his side of things in a new interview with GQ. He said that people have shared the clip from his 1995 movie Assassins and explained the way it's used.

"Everybody is saying that to me. Yeah. And I know the moment of the movie," he said, when asked.

Banderas went back to the time when that scene was shot and explained the genesis of the reaction.

"I got him, the enemy, the person that I wanted, and he was so happy, like," he said, before acting out the GIF. "I don't totally understand this new generation and those memes things and those stuff. It's fun, I guess."

He said that the film was shot around the time that he began seeing his ex-wife Melanie Griffith, to whom he was married for nearly 20 years.

"We were shooting in Seattle, and it was at the beginning with my career here. It was about the time that, actually, Melanie and I got together. I remember her and Dakota [Johnson, her daughter] coming to visit at the set," he said.

Elsewhere in the interview, Banderas turned a question about voicing Puss in Boots into a discussion on the way that Hollywood tends to make "black and Hispanic" characters villains. He said that he enjoyed the comedic aspect of Puss in Boots, but added he was also trying to project a heroic character with an accent to the kids who were watching.

"With Puss in Boots, the interesting thing is that the movie is for kids. And the kids are listening to a hero who has an accent, and the bad guy—Billy Bob Thorton specifically—[talks in] perfect English. It's very interesting because it made things change. You send messages that go to the back of your brain—and in this case the back of kids’ brains—for diversity and understanding, that there are no good people and bad people depending on their race or their religion or their social status," he said. "So that's why the character was, for me, a little more serious than others."

Take a look at the whole interview over at GQ.