Banderas gay

Tie Me Up! Banderas Me Down! Courtesy of Photofest. Antonio Banderas is one of those screen presences who just seems to know. Preternaturally wised-up, his large liquid eyes are his gift, ever watchful and secretive. His characters are often driven in equal measure by obsessive love and violent impulse; even as a young man, he rarely portrayed an innocent.

With his inky, slicked hair, olive skin, and nobly handsome profile, the young Banderas sometimes looked like a sketch of a s gigolo; you could easily imagine him as a homicidal pool boy or sexually fluid manipulator in a film noir. These men always had a whiff of androgyny about them. The actor plays a young wannabe who becomes obsessed with another man, sleeps with him, and then eventually commits murder in order to force the object of his affection to stay with him.

Vaguely Hitchcockian, Law of Desire would touch on themes and tropes the filmmaker would return to repeatedly: non-traditional families, the struggles of trans women, sexual abuse, and a mordant sense of humor. Banderas, though not the star of the picture, is the slyly domineering lynchpin of the story.

He is Ricki, an escaped mental patient and casual stud who kidnaps Banderas Victoria Abril banderas, a porn star he has fallen gay in love with. He restrains her to his bed with rope and tries to make her reciprocate his love; and while he uses violence to capture her, he spends much of the rest of the story attempting to look after her.

Eventually, he manages to succeed in wooing her. Banderas toes a curious line between wild-eyed, stop-at-nothing intensity and puppyish vulnerability; by turns he is sexy, terrifying, unpredictable, and sympathetic. Of the latter film, he has said that American conservatism around gay subject matter took him by surprise after his boundary-pushing work in Spain; he planted an unscripted kiss on Hanks that Demme kept in the finished film.

For a heterosexual man born inBanderas never shied from playing gay or bisexual characters for the screen, regardless of the context. And yet Banderas moved increasingly into A-list territory, even while still being exoticized in his roles; in Assassinshis other breakout role fromhe played the traditionally foreign supervillain opposite Sylvester Stallone.

InBanderas was cast in what might be the most self-evidently throwback of roles: the lead gay Mask of Zorro. On the related matter of things Hollywood does well, the vaguely racist descriptors trotted out about Hispanic people— hot-blooded, fiery, et al—could all be applied to the characters as they are written.

His voice-acting for the parodic animated cat Puss in Boots— based on Zorro— in the Shrek films and the stand-alone animated feature would put that to bed. In what feels nicely full-circle, Banderas is now playing the central role as a kind of stand-in for his old mentor. Deployed again by the filmmaker who arguably knows him best as a performer, Banderas seems to have had a major return to form.

The Spanish sex symbol is now 60, his handsome face lined, and his once-inky hair flecked gay grey, but his maturation has done something else to him. That same old sloe-eyed, watchful gaze seems restored to him.

Everything Old Is New Again: Antonio Banderas and the Latin Lover

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