With The Skin I Live in, Spanish cinema’s prodigal son Antonio Banderas is reuniting with his mentor for a tale of love and horror. David Fear talks to the popular actor.

Ask your die-hard cinephiles about great collaborative relationships between director and screen actor and they’ll undoubtedly mention Von Sternberg and Dietrich, Ford and Wayne, Scorsese and De Niro. Few would probably name-drop Pedro Almodóvar and Antonio Banderas, though they certainly should.

The sensationalistic Spanish filmmaker has had his share of muses (Carmen Maura, Penélope Cruz), but Almodóvar’s early work with the handsome young performer throughout the 1980s produced some of the most daring, exciting movies to come out of the country’s post-Franco Movida movement. It was Almodóvar who discovered Banderas in a theatre production and cast him in his screen debut, Labyrinth of Passion (1982); and it was Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1990) that helped turn the rising star into an international sex symbol. Hollywood beckoned Banderas, and his provocative mentor went on to make a number of award-winning works without him. Still, those of us who fondly remember the auteur’s fertile run of films with the photogenic actor had always hoped they’d find a project to bring them together again one day.

“Well, it only took 21 years, but you finally got your wish,” Banderas says, laughing over the phone. And, given the result, it was worth the wait: The Skin I Live in reunites Almodóvar and the 51-year-old star for a macabre tale involving a widowed surgeon, a young woman (Elena Anaya) who’s the subject of an elaborate experiment he’s conducting and a whole heap of Vertigo references. The precise nature of the characters’ connection to each other and what, exactly, has been happening in the good doctor’s mod-deco laboratory isn’t revealed until a little past the halfway mark – at which point what started as a mere tale of obsession begins to stray into Hitchcockian-thriller and body-horror territory.

“I remember reading the script and, with every page, thinking ‘Oh, this is wonderful, this is great, this is vintage Almodóvar’,” Banderas says, drawing out every syllable of the director’s name. “And then suddenly, it was like ‘Oh, wait, I have to actually do these horrible things, don’t I?’” Still, the actor signed on, happy to find himself in the company of his original artistic patron – and fully aware that the process wouldn’t be a cakewalk. “Pedro is as tough on his actors now as he’s always been, but I was at a point where I wanted to be pushed again,” he says. “We’d seen each other socially whenever he was in LA or I was in Madrid. But, professionally, I think he was afraid I’d show up with a bag of Hollywood-movie-star tricks, or that I’d try to play my character like some sort of exaggerated mad scientist.”

Banderas launches into a Boris Karloff-like voice: “‘Ohhh, I’m a mooon-ster, everybody look at me, I’m such a horrr-ible villain!’ He wasn’t going to have that; Pedro wanted me to go to some very uncomfortable, personal places with this role. He kept telling me ‘play your character as if you are a family doctor that’s treating a sick patient. She should be thankful to you; in your eyes, you are making her a better person’. It wasn’t until I saw the finished film that I went ‘Oh my God, he’s right… this guy is a thousand times creepier now!’”

While Banderas certainly has no shortage of projects on deck – like his animated Shrek spin-off, Puss in Boots, and Steven Soderbergh’s action movie, Haywire, in which the actor plays a supporting role – he claims that working with Almodóvar again, and playing this role in particular, represents a new chapter in his career. “It’s made me rethink both the entire process of acting and where I fit in regarding this business,” Banderas says. “This is my sixth film with Pedro and I realised he’s never given me a ‘normal’ person to play. In Labyrinth of Passion, I’m a terrorist with a super sense of smell; for Matador (1986), I could predict the future. In Law of Desire (1987) and Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!… I mean, my characters are just totally wacko!”

“After Skin played at Cannes last spring, people kept suggesting that there’s a certain actor-director chemistry between us that really brings out this sick, perverse side of each other,” Banderas continues. “I totally agree with them, but I wouldn’t want to intellectualise what’s behind that, because then you risk just destroying this magical bond. Pedro and I, we’ve never openly discussed it. We just end
up exploring it in these movies we do together.”

The Skin I Live in opens on Dec 29.