Interview: Antonio Banderas, actor

“The teachers thought there was something seriously wrong,” he says. Actually, he was just a shy child, who was already teased for his slightly protruding ears. “Corrected by nature,” he says emphatically. “Not surgery.” Natural development also took care of his silence once he started taking part in school dramas and grew more confident about the sound of his voice.

Today, sleek in a tight grey sweater and ripped stonewash jeans, he talks in rapid, accented, idiosyncratic English, half an octave higher than his animated alter ego in Puss In Boots. “That’s because he is a LION in the body of a kittykat,” he booms.

Actors nowadays rarely tear into their roles with such hammy gusto, but the Spanish star clearly adores playing the macho, swashbuckling cat. The character first appeared ten years ago in Shrek 2, and at the film’s first press conference with Banderas, Shrek (Mike Myers) and Mrs Shrek (Cameron Diaz), one journalist raved, “your character is the best thing in the film”. Banderas glowed and took a bow. Myers’ face dropped like an anchor. Now Puss in Boots has an origins movie of his own which is walloping the competition at the American box office. Banderas is proud of this, and even the fact that it is the third biggest ticket in Russian movie history, not previously known as a nation of cat lovers. Presumably it’s been dubbed by an actor who is not Banderas, but the character remains patterned after the actor’s matador-meets-matinee idol appeal.

“They told me the character had to be French, like a D’Artagnan from The Three Musketeers,” says Banderas. “But once I jumped in there with my accent, he soon became Zorro.”

Director Chris Miller takes familiar spaghetti western motifs (brawls, frontier romance and startling camera angles and cuts) then plays them for surreal comedy and Saturday matinee thrills. The film steadfastly refuses to make sense – how can Zach Galifianakis’ Humpty Dumpty run around in the Mexican sun without getting hard boiled? – but its momentum is hard to resist. It also teams Banderas with Salma Hayek for the first time since Robert Rodriguez’s Desperado. Hayek’s catty cutpurse Kitty Softpaws forms a sparky feline tandem, and unlike most animation these days, Banderas and Hayek recorded their banter together, rather than in separate sessions.

“Such a relief to be in a recording studio,” says Banderas, and it turns out he doesn’t just mean that interaction was easier with Hayek physically present. “On Desperado we did so many stunts together, and just about survived. But I still remember one scene in the film where we were hanging in the air off a piece of rope, and just one guy was holding on to the other end. I could hear the rope strain – kkkkkkkk – and I was thinking, ‘Oh my god, me and Salma, we are going to die here.’”

Banderas is a stoic – while learning swordplay for The Mask Of Zorro, his hands were badly cut yet he never said a word – but Hayek was more outspoken. “I will never forget us dangling in mid-air, with her screaming at Rodriguez – ‘Robert! I am not a piñata!’”

As Banderas points out, when he first arrived in Hollywood 20 years ago, he was largely known for his Spanish films with Pedro Almodovar and spoke little English. “The fact that I now do the voice of Puss in Boots is mindblowing,” he says.

“When I was supposed to discuss my first English movie, The Mambo Kings, I had dinner with the director Arne Glimcher in London, and I could not follow what he was talking about. I knew a few sentences of English from old Beatles songs, but even though he spoke slowly, I could not understand. He tried to explain what he wanted with his hands for two hours – a big monologue. And I kept making faces, going, ‘Oh course, right, right, right’.”

The Mambo Kings didn’t turn the Spanish actor into an overnight global sensation, but it was the beginning of an international career that has made him a star of Hollywood popcorn pictures of every description. Yet it’s only lately that he has overcome casting according to what he calls his “handicap condition”; which is that he is an actor with an accent.

It may be the reason why he was initially cast as larger than life characters such as Zorro and Pancho Villa before graduating towards more realistic, contemporary characters. His exoticism was turned down to a peep for instance, when he played Greg, Naomi Watts’ boss in Woody Allen’s You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger.

But always with that smoulder. “Playing Antonio’s lover, I was the envy of 95 per cent of the women in the world, and probably 65 per cent of the men,” said Tom Hanks, when Banderas played the boyfriend nursing him through Aids and a court case in Philadelphia. He beguiled Madonna around the time of Truth Or Dare and during her tour she arranged for him to attend a party thrown for her, with a minxy plot to seduce him. Alas, he brought along his first wife, Ana Leza, and Madonna went home empty-handed.

When Banderas was a struggling actor in Spain, this unselfconscious, approachable sexiness prompted an underground director called Pedro Almodovar to cross the room and tell Banderas: “You have a very romantic face. You should be an actor.” Later he cast him as a gay Iranian terrorist with a remarkable sense of smell in Labyrinth Of Passion. Banderas was 22. “I thought, ‘This guy is crazy or a genius,’ says Banderas. “Luckily for us, he was both.”

The film was the first of five quirky social satires they made together which were both taboo-breaking and wildly successful in a country that was discovering its wild side in the aftermath of Franco’s repressive regime. But Banderas was also thirled to a filmmaker who liked absolute control, and when the actor started to pitch in ideas, he was rebuffed.

“‘No, no, no, no,’ he said to me. ‘You don’t have the ideas. I do.’ With Pedro, you have to allow him to play with you like a pen, and he is the writer.” The two men broke their partnership when Banderas opted to do Mambo Kings instead of Almodovar’s High Heels. Almodovar appears to have sulked a bit in his tent, while Banderas shrugged and got on with a long road to international star status. This year, however, they reconciled for the sexy horror of The Skin I Live In, where Banderas plays a surgeon who keeps a bandaged woman prisoner in his house. The film seems certain to collect Best Foreign Language awards next year but Banderas admits feeling conflicted over his return to his old ally.

“Such a long-postponed encounter invites certain trepidation,” Banderas says. “You think maybe things have changed. But then I saw that Pedro hadn’t gone bourgeois at all, and my fears dissipated.”

The script took Almodovar nine drafts and ten years to perfect, and when the director finally called Banderas to announce he was ready to roll, his first words were “It’s about time.”

Banderas says he’s pretty much the same as when he started out, except more relaxed. His 17-year second marriage, to actress Melanie Griffiths, has survived paparazzi intrusion and her well-publicised addictions. “We’ve never hidden our problems,” he says. “But Melanie is so strong. It makes me love her even more.” The last time she slipped, he says stoutly, was more than three years ago, and he is endearingly soppy about their daughter, Stella, now 15.

Banderas has a slew of films set for release including Black Gold, where he plays an Arab chief, and Stephen Soderbergh’s Haywire, in which he promises “a big beard – like an evangelist.” In future, however, he hopes to kick back a bit more and swashbuckle a bit less. “Do I need a boat, a jet?” he asks. “No. I don’t want more.” v

Puss in Boots is in cinemas from 9 December