Antonio Banderas has revealed that he had to deal with some pretty overt racism when he came to Hollywood in the 1990s.
Sitting down with The Times, the storied actor reflected on making the jump from his home country, Spain, to the big bright lights of Hollywood.
"They said, 'You are here, like the Blacks and the Hispanics, to play the bad guys,'" Banderas recalled Hollywood movie executives telling him at the time. However, just a few years after his arrival, the 65-year-old landed the role that would turn the aforementioned stereotype on its head: 1998's The Mask of Zorro.
"The problem was a few years later, I had a mask, hat, sword, and cape, and the bad guy was Captain Love, who was blond and had blue eyes."
"Even more important is Puss in Boots, because it’s for young kids," Banderas added of his Shrek character, which received its own spin-off. "They see a cat that has a Spanish, even an Andalusian accent, and he’s a good guy."
The '90s were huge for Banderas. His first Hollywood film was 1992's The Mambo Kings, starring alongside Armand Assante as brothers and musicians who flee Cuba for New York City. Banderas went on to appear in the 1993 Oscar-nominated film Philadelphia, bigger-budget movies like 1994's Interview With a Vampire, and indie offerings like 1995's Desperado. He also played Che opposite Madonna in 1996's Evita.
The Mask of Zorro, which also starred Anthony Hopkins and Catherine Zeta-Jones, was a box-office hit, earning $250 million globally despite a production budget of less than $100 million. Banderas and Zeta-Jones later reprised their roles in the 2005 sequel, The Legend of Zorro.
Elsewhere in the new interview, Banderas talked about his 2017 near-fatal heart attack, explaining that it "changed the way I look at life."
The actor was living between the U.S. and the UK when it happened. Pretty much instantly, he quit smoking, sold his private jet and returned to Malaga, the city of his birth, where he bought a theatre.
