Roles Piling Up for Mexican Heartthrob

September 12, 2004

Los Angeles -- The pencil-thin brunette apparently can't contain herself another moment. She's been glancing at Mexican heartthrob Diego Luna for the past 15 minutes as he sits on the sun-dappled patio of the Chateau Marmont, talking shop and smoking. Finally, she walks up to his table and asks for a light. Luna, dressed in blue jeans, T-shirt, golf cap and sandals, cheerfully obliges. She walks away, smiling. Such is Luna's allure that even in jaded Los Angeles, women concoct excuses to check out the slight 24-year-old actor with the liquid brown eyes. Until three years ago, Luna's boyish charms had been confined to a succession of soap opera roles and little-seen movies. Then he starred with his childhood friend Gael García Bernal in the sexy road picture "Y tu mamá también."

"In two months, my whole life changed," Luna says. "Before 'Y tu mamá' I did 16 movies that only my family got to see because I invited them to the premiere. Now I have more freedom to choose where I want to be and what I want to do."

Luna lives in Mexico City when he's not working. Filming "Criminal" in Los Angeles, he says, was the next best thing to being at home. "In creating that character, I had help from a friend who lives in East L. A. On Sunday I was there, and people were on the streets, at the taco stand, walking to the store. I thought, 'This is not L.A. -- people are walking. They use their legs and walk!' It was like working in Mexico."

The Anglo-Hispanic dichotomy in "Criminal" embodied by its two central characters serves more as backdrop than central theme. "This is not a movie just for the Latin audience or a movie for the American audience," Luna says. "It's a movie that talks about a city in a real way, a city that has so many frontiers. Every day, you're reading things in Spanish and English at the same time, and yet people really don't share -- either you go to the east side, where they eat tacos, or the west side, where they eat Asian food. It's like there's no mixture. Rodrigo is not a gang member. He's not a cholo. He knows how to maneuver in both worlds. He wants to be a good guy. But the only way he knows how to make money is by cheating people."

In his forthcoming thriller "Nicotina," Luna plays Lolo, a lonely hacker who swipes Swiss bank access codes for his criminal clients but is more interested in using his high-tech surveillance gear to spy on the woman living in the downstairs apartment. "It was a fun role to play because I'm so different from that," says Luna, who happily acknowledges that he barely knew how to turn on a computer before being cast in the part. "Lolo is shy and doesn't like himself, and is an a -- in human relations. That's just not my life. I'm always around friends, I like sharing, I love touching and saying what I think -- sometimes that's my problem, that I say everything I think. I couldn't be spying on someone more than a day without going up and saying, 'Hey, I like you.' It has to be a very pathetic life for this hacker. Behind the computer screen he's a magician, but out there in the world, he has no weapons to confront life."

To invest his awkward character with a personal touch, Luna recalled his junior high school years. "When I was around 13, I used to be the best friend of lots of girls," he says. "When they are crying, 'Oh, he broke my heart,' I am sitting there thinking, 'I wish I was that guy and not the friend.' Then, for the first time, I said to this girl, 'I like you,' and after that day, everything seemed easier, you know?"

It's easy to picture Luna as the type of boy girls could confide in. In fact, Luna's air of innocence is one of the qualities that has made him so attractive to filmmakers. "In addition to being an excellent actor, Diego at the same time looks like a nice guy, and that's what I needed," says "Nicotina" director Hugo Rodríguez. "He then ended up taking the character to a whole other level than I had imagined."

Besides the recent string of English-language movies, Diego has been using his "Y tu mamá" clout to jump-start his own projects. He produced and performed in "The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged)," which ran for nearly three years in Mexico City. He's also producing and acting in "Solo Dios sabe" ("Only God Knows"), which was written specifically for Luna by director Carlos Bolado. "It's a love story between a Mexican journalist and a Brazilian woman," he says. "It's very sweet, about two orphans, and for me it's very personal."

Diego, whose mother died in a car accident when he was 2 years old, was raised by his father, who was involved in theater. "I guess that's why I do this," says Luna, who began acting in his father's productions when he was 7. "It was a chance to be around him. Also, doing theater gives you a family in a way. You spend four months rehearsing something, then six or seven performing it, so you see the same people for a year, and you get a family."

For the most part, Luna has enjoyed the perks that come with his newfound celebrity... And while Luna has a lengthy wish list of Anglo talent he'd love to work with -- Philip Seymour Hoffman is one of his idols -- the actor wants to continue making movies in Mexico as well. Which explains his smoking... "I quit smoking seven months ago," he says between drags. "And now that I'm producing this movie in Mexico, I'm smoking again. It's such a tense thing. You're always in a rush. You never know if the check is going to get in on time to pay everyone."

"In Mexico you need to be a bulldog to make a movie, because everything is set up for you to go back home and get depressed and not do the movie. I don't know if 'bulldog' is the word. Maybe you'll find the right word. In Mexico we call it terco (stubborn). The guy who goes out every day, and every day they tell him no, and the next day he's there, and the next day he's there. That's the kind of people who make movies in Mexico."

Source: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/09/12/PKGF28FUNR1.DTL