El Gran Pensador (The Great Thinker)

I first met Gael García Bernal in 2001 at a London cinema called The Screen on the Green. It was one of my very first writing assignments -- covering a screening of the (now iconic) movie Y tu mamá también. That film, along with 2000's Amores Perros (which also starred Bernal), marked the surge of the buena onda, the new wave of Mexican film that would establish Bernal's homeland -- and Bernal himself -- as leading forces in independent world cinema. Sadly, at the time I didn't know much about independent world cinema. And as Bernal entered the theatre with his co-star Diego Luna, I asked him possibly the dumbest question I've ever asked an actor: "So... how does it feel to be a movie star hunk, Gael?" Bernal turned his dazzling hazel-colored eyes on me and seemed to really think about it. "It's great!" he laughed.

Eight years later, I meet Bernal again, this time on a lawn outside the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. He's still a "movie-star hunk" -- an even bigger one now, which is ironic, considering he's "never had any desire to be successful." He tells me this with a sincerity only possible from someone who's been successful his whole life (Bernal was a child star in Mexico). But his humility rings true, and after just a few minutes with him, it's clear I'm talking to that rarest and most alluring of actors -- an intellectual who happens to be humble. (And yes, hunky -- in a fragile, Legolas-meets-Byron kind of way.)

We sit at the top of a grassy hill and talk. His gaze is unsettlingly direct, and his beatific smile disarming. He possesses an easy, twinkle-eyed wisdom that recalls old men in rocking chairs, and his well-fermented philosophies on life, love and existentialism are dispensed with humor. Even the smallest mundanities are ripe with meta-meaning for Bernal -- take his boots, for example. "Are they by a designer?" I ask. "For me, there's no such thing as 'designer' and 'not designer,'" is his reply. "Boots are boots." Ah, of course. A truly well-crafted boot, according to Bernal, is up there with 2001: A Space Odyssey. "Every boot tells a story, some of them better than others -- and it's the same for film," he says. "There is no difference between filmmaking and boot-making -- either of them can result in art."

Since our first meeting in 2001, Bernal has evolved from New World novelty to recognizable global commodity (Babel, The Science of Sleep). He's tried his hand at directing (Déficit) and co-founded a traveling documentary festival named Ambulante. He's played Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara twice (The Motorcycle Diaries, Fidel) and founded, with Diego Luna and Pablo Cruz, a film production company, Canana Films (a canana is the bullet belt Mexican freedom fighters would sling over their shoulders). And now he's a father -- his first son Lazaro with his girlfriend, Argentine actress Dolores Fonzi, was born in January. "I feel more mature, definitely," he says, "more settled down. And yet creatively, things are much more in the air than ever. It's OK, I've never wanted to have an obvious route ahead of me anyway."

The Mexican film industry, it seems, has grown worldlier with him -- when Luna and Bernal famously shared a drunken make-out scene in Y tu mamá también, the film was one of fewer than ten films made in Mexico that year. Today, the country produces more than 50 movies a year, many of them intended for international distribution. It's a shame though, says Bernal, that films from Mexico (or anywhere that isn’t America) tend to get lumped all together under the rubric of "foreign" films. "For me, films are films, they don't have a nationality," he explains. "But's a strange categorization -- I have never said to my friends, 'Hey, let's go out and watch a foreign film.'"

His current movie, another "foreign" film called Rudo y Cursi, sees him reunited with Diego Luna for the first time since Y tu mamá. A tragicomic fable about brotherhood, rivalry and soccer, Rudo y Cursi (translation "Tough and Corny") is already one of the top-five grossing movies in Mexico, ever. It took nearly a decade for the film industry to present Bernal and Luna with a reunion project that felt right. "After Y tu mamá también we got all these offers, but they were all like Y tu mamá, but in English," Bernal says. "We wanted to do something that was different." And Rudo y Cursi is indeed special -- lighter than Y tu mamá, it does nonetheless showcase Bernal and Luna's incredible onscreen chemistry to its fullest (and funniest) extreme. "We're very good together," acknowledges Bernal of his connection with Luna. "We do this creative ping-pong with one another -- we're good at criticizing each other constructively, and we have a lot of fun. It's a working relationship I wish to have forever."

It helped of course that a Latin American dream team was behind the film. Written and directed by Carlos Cuarón (who co-wrote Y tu mamá también), Rudo was produced by Cha Cha Chá, the production company founded by Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men), Alejandro González Iñárritu (21 Grams, Babel) and Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth). In some form or another, they've all been connected since the buena onda first began to swell -- the Cuarón brothers, especially, says Bernal, were "responsible for introducing us to this amazing thing called cinema. They set us on this journey." So when Carlos suggested the two reunite in Rudo y Cursi, "there were no second thoughts."

Bernal plays Cursi, an uneducated banana plantation worker who lets his remarkable gift for soccer wither due to delusions of becoming a pop star. Delusions, that is, because he has a terrible singing voice. Bernal himself has no delusions about his own singing, even though he did perform a song on stage with Devendra Banhart in Los Angeles in 2007 (I was there -- it was brief, but beautiful). Bernal's normally more of a sing-in-the-shower type of guy. "Honestly, I can only really sing if I have a mask," he says, "like when I was playing the character of Cursi." Cursi ("Corny") is so-called thanks to his dreamy, sentimental nature. Luna's character, Cursi's half-brother Rudo ("Tough"), got his nickname because he takes a more aggressive approach. In real life, both actors possess a little cursi and a little rudo. "I am a bit more soft than Diego in different ways," Bernal says. "Actually, we're both pretty corny at the end of the day."

Bernal grew up in the city of Guadalajara, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, birthplace of tequila and mariachi music. His parents introduced him to the world of acting at a young age through their involvement with Mexico's underground theatre scene. Their influence may explain his learned views on art and film. His passion for movies verges on cinefilia -- in the course of one conversation he references (among many others) films like Antonioni's counterculture classic Zabriskie Point; The Mirror, a 1975 film by Russian auteur Andrei Tarkovsky ("everyone must see this film"); and Buñuel's 1950's Los Olvidados. The latter provided a blueprint for social realism in cinema, as reflected in films like Rudo y Cursi -- films that highlight social and political truths without ramming them down the audience's throat. "I think the approach of utilizing a social issue to create a film is tasteless," says Bernal. "It's like living in the Holocaust and saying, 'Oh, this would make a good movie.' If you want to 'throw light' on an issue, then make a documentary. But don't pretend it is film."

Barely in his thirties, Bernal is a natural philosopher, an eternal student and an impressive ambassador for the culture of Mexico. Yet, one of the most important decisions he ever made, he says, was to leave Mexico. "I've had many great teachers," he explains. "But the best teacher is always the decisions one makes. I could have stayed in Mexico, working and working, but instead I went to school to study [at The Central School of Speech and Drama in London]. That changed everything for me." It was while he was in school that he was invited to star in Amores Perros (he pretended to have a tropical fever so he could skip classes and complete shooting; then he went back to school to finish his three-year training). The impact of Amores Perros only hit him later when he sat down to watch a first screening. That was a pivotal moment in his career as an actor, he says, the moment when he realized how film can be so much greater than the sum of its parts, elevated by a weightless magic that he's still trying to understand. "It was an almost spiritual shakeup for me," Bernal recalls. "It made me realize how films can fill you with energy -- to have sex, to feel things, to change your life." He stops to ponder some more. "Yes, it's all still a mystery for me."

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