Hispanic Magazine
2004

Is He Lying or Acting?

"I like telling lies to people," Mexican actor Diego Luna says, barely concealing a laugh as he prepares for a photo shoot to promote his new film, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights-- a retelling of the popular movie set, this time on the eve of the 1959 Cuban Revolution.

That audiences from Mexico City to Miami to Madrid have lined up in droves to be deceived by this boyishly handsome 25-year-old would not be an exaggeration. Since his breakthrough role as the disaffected youth Tenoch in director Alfonso Cuaron's 2001 film Y Tu Mama Tambien, Luna has worked steadily in films in Mexico, Hollywood, and abroad. Now readying for the debut of his first leading role in an English-language film, he is bracing for how fans and audiences will react to his most commercial film yet. "Havana Nights is basically a love story," Luna says in a telephone interview from California where the Mexican native was filming The Terminal with actor Tom Hanks and director Steven Spielberg. "There is a whole generation that doesn't know Cuba before Fidel and they will now have that chance. The movie takes a lot of risks placing the movie during the revolution."

Produced by Miramax and Artisan Films, the film takes place in 1958 in the titular city where Katey Miller, played by actress Romola Garai in the role made famous by Jennifer Grey, begins her life as an ex-patriot American. Replacing Patrick Swayze's hunk is Luna, who plays a humble, Cuban hotel waiter named Javier who woos Katey on to the dance floor to--according to the studio's press materials--"learn the slinky, spectacular moves that Javier seems to know in his bones." While the two would-be lovers heat up the screen, Havana-- Puerto Rico in reality--boils over with revolutionary fervor.

Luna, who says he had never professionally danced before, spent nearly three months practicing and preparing for the role of Javier, and he is joined by director John Ferland and a cast that includes Sela Ward, most recently on television's Once and Again, and John Slattery, last seen in Steven Soderbergh's Traffic. The original 1987 movie was so popular, grossing more than $170 million and spawning countless dirty dancing contests worldwide, that replicating its success may be difficult. Luna was reluctant to compare the two films-- and quick to point out that he was only 8-years-old when it came out--though he says he thinks audiences will like Havana Nights and accept it for what it is: "a movie with a lot of great music and dancing."

Indeed, while the embargo against trading and traveling to the communist island remains in place, Americans' love affair with all things Cuban has grown stronger in the last few years as Cuba's music, culture, and forbidden mystique have filtered in to the public consciousness. Filmmakers for the most part have shied away from setting their films in Cuba for fear of offending Cuban Americans or because of political backlash, but that wariness may be fading. "Whether they are in the island or off the island, Cubans all have an intensity and they talk about Cuba all the time and with such a love for the island," he says. "I hope this movie will get all these people and more to see Cuba. It's not so political."

Luna is not shy about starring in controversial movies. His pedigree includes playing the charged role of Carlos in director Julian Schnabel's politically charged film, Before Night Falls, about the life and death of the celebrated poet and author Reynaldo Arenas, who died of complications stemming from AIDS while in exile in New York. He pressed the flesh with Salma Hayek as Frida Kahlo's lover Alejandro Gonzalez Arias, in director Julie Taymor's 2003 film Frida. And more recently he starred in director Martin Salinas' Nicotina, a dark comedy centered around lust and greed against the backdrop of Mexico City.

But it was Luna's role as a wealthy and superbly bored urban teenager in the coming-of-age flick Y Tu Mama Tambien that earned him an enduring spot in pop culture. In the movie, he stars next to his longtime childhood friend, actor Gael Garcia Bernal, who plays a similar role as Tenoch's best friend and companion, Julio. In this comedy, the duo embarks on a road trip though the Mexican countryside with an older woman, Luisa, played by Spanish actress Maribel Verdu. That this supposed older woman is barely in her 30s means little to the youths who alternatively spend their time seducing her and being seduced, while all three slowly reveal truths to one another and to themselves. "That was the greatest movie that I've been in so far and the one I love the most," Luna says. "I had the chance to work with my best friend and a director that I admire a lot. I won a lot of confidence in my work after that."

Y Tu Mama Tambien broke box office records in Mexico and ushered in a level of sexual candor in the country. The film was shockingly sexy enough to assure it would receive plenty of word-of-mouth from both audiences and critics alike, and it became the most widely distributed foreign-language film in recent U.S. history. Luna says the movie's appeal springs from its universal themes.  "It was more than a Latin American movie. It was something that we all go through of finding out about ourselves."

The movie's director, Alfonso Cuaron, returned to Mexico to do the film after international success directing English-language films such as Great Expectations and A Little Princess. In past interviews, he says his homeland of Mexico is as much a teenagers as any portrayed in the movie itself--a country adrift, conflicted and in search of its own identity. Luna agrees with that assessment and laments the sad state of the Mexican film industry, which is suffering after government budget cuts slashed much of its financial support recently.

"This is a really bad time for movies in Mexico," Luna says. "The government hasn't realized that Mexico is known in the world for its culture and for its corruption, and they are choosing not to support the culture, and that is sad." Luna's passion for acting is understandable. He was quite literally raised in the theater. Growing up in the Mexico City neighborhood of Coyoacan, he spent hours following around his father--his mother, a costume designer, died when he was two years-old--as he prepared sets as a production designer for theaters and opera houses.

At 7 he was invited to play a small role in a play and has been acting ever since, he says. "I like telling lies to people, and I found out there was a job that paid me to do that. I remember being five or six years old, watching my father and learning all the lines of the play to share time with him." The theater became a surrogate parent to the young Luna, who found it more enjoyable to hang around a set than to play soccer with his friends. By the age of twelve, he made his television debut in the tele-novela El Abuelo y Yo and went on to star in several more television productions before being cast in director Javier Bourges' Academy Award-winning 1991 short film El Ultimo Fin Del Ano.

"In Mexico you have to do TV to pay your rent and theater to have fun and learn the trade," he says. Not that he has had much trouble finding work these days. Since Y Tu Mama Tambien, the actor has been offered a steady stream of work in Hollywood including a role opposite Kevin Costner and Robert Duvall in the Western Open Range, as well as in Spain where he worked on the film adaptation of the novel Soldados de Salamina by Spanish writer Javier Cercas. Nicole Guillemet, the director of the Miami International Film Festival, says Luna is "definitely a young actor to watch. Since 200, he has been doing extraordinary work. The three films he is in that will be coming out in 2004 are going to really propel him into the limelight of an audience that will love him."

One of those films, The Terminal, has Luna in the role of an airport employee who befriends an immigrant (played by Hanks) who takes up residence in the terminal after authorities refuse his entry because his country of origin has ceased to exist. Being on the set with Hanks and director Spielberg has been a revelation, Luna says. "That they are so successful and still enjoy what they do a lot, and work a lot, gives me a lot of hope. Steven gives so much energy to what he does. It's almost like watching a young director giving a lot of passion to his work."

He added that Spielberg "allows people to collaborate. He enjoys making people happy and telling stories. And the same with Tom. He's also very generous. You would imagine that such big names are tough to work with, but it's the opposite."

Luna hopes to work in the future with directors Paul Thomas Anderson and the Coen Brothers as well as a new crop of Mexican directors that he says are up-and-coming. He also hopes to reunite professionally with director Cuaron and on screen with his best friend and Y Tu Mama Tambien co-star Bernal, with whom he shared a passionate kiss in the final moments of that movie.

"You know, that kiss follows me around everywhere. Everyone asked me about it," Luna laughs. "Who's the best kisser? Maribel, for sure. With Gael I had to remember I was an actor getting paid to do that. I haven't kissed another guy since."

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