Actors Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal have been friends since they were babies in Mexico City.
Actually, as the story goes – they met even earlier.
“Diego was still a molecule. He was still a little amoeba,” says García Bernal – who, according to the family lore, was a year old when his parents took him to the hospital where Luna was born.
“When I was finally delivered into this world, he was there waiting for me,” says Luna. “And he looked at me and said –”
“You’re late, but welcome,” García Bernal interjects.
Their parents had been great friends too; García Bernal’s father was an acclaimed theater director, his mother an actress; Luna’s father was a well-known set designer, and his mother a costume designer.
“They were doing a theater play, and I think Gael was born when they were rehearsing and I was born when they were executing the play,” says Luna. “Whoever wasn't actually needed on the stage was taking care of us, I guess. And I think that that has a lot to do with the connection we have.”
The night before our interview, Luna and García Bernal were onstage together at the Emmy Awards in Los Angeles. They announced and presented one award entirely in their native language.
“It was nice to go all the way…to do it just in Spanish,” Luna says, explaining it was a nod to the huge Spanish-speaking audience in the U.S.
“We have to be unapologetic about it, because Spanish is one of the main languages in the United States,” adds García Bernal. “Contextually, politically, there is a reason to speak in Spanish. And also it sounds a little bit radical to do.”
Now, Luna and García Bernal are teaming up again, for Hulu’s first original series in Spanish: La Máquina.
“I’m 44,” says Luna. “I had to wait to be 44 to do a show in Spanish produced by an American studio. So it’s just the time, right?”
Two intertwined careers
Both actors have followed in their parents’ footsteps: As teens in the 1990s, they acted on stage and in TV soap operas such as El Abuelo y Yo. Then in 2000, García Bernal got his big break in Alejandro González Iñárritu’s film Amores Perros.
The following year, he and Luna starred as best friends in a love triangle in the coming-of-age road trip movie Y Tu Mamá También.
“From the get-go, it was very clear the incredible talent, also the amazing friendship that they have is something very touching, really beautiful,” recalls director Alfonso Cuarón.
García Bernal says it was such a small production crew, they helped carry the camera bags and asked about the camera lenses. “They found us like these little mascots,” he says, adding that hearing the conversations between Cuarón and cinematographer Emmanuel “Chivo” Lubezki was “like being around John Lennon and [Paul] McCartney talking about music.”
Cuaron remembers the two actors always making fun of them. “There is a great sense of humor around them. I think it’s one of those great duos of cinema.”
In 2008, the pair teamed again for the soccer movie Rudo y Cursi, and again in 2012 with Will Ferrell in Casa de mi Padre, but they’ve mostly had separate acting careers: Luna with a role as a drug trafficker in Narcos: Mexico, and as the lead in the Star Wars Rogue One spinoff series Andor.
Meanwhile, García Bernal has played everything from Che Guevara in The Motorcycle Diaries, to the orchestra conductor in Mozart in the Jungle to the great-great grandfather in Disney’s Coco.
As producers, they partnered nearly 20 years ago to create the Ambulante Film Festival, to showcase documentaries in Mexico. They also co-created two production companies, Canana Films and La Corriente del Golfo, focused on social justice themes. Later this month, Netflix will begin streaming one documentary Luna executive produced, State of Silence [Estado del Silencio], about the risks Mexican journalists face in covering the drug wars.
Cuarón says he admires their artistic choices and the opportunities they give other actors and filmmakers.
“What is really incredible is to see how, as the years pass, how they have embraced life with integrity and full responsibility of who they are and who they represent —particularly, in Mexico, Latin America,” says Cuarón. “And just to watch the two of them on screen is just pure joy and pleasure.”
Making La Máquina
Luna says for many years, they’d been trying to cook up another project to reunite as producers and actors. And one hungover morning during the Berlin Film Festival, they say, they came up with La Máquina. It’s about two best friends: a boxer and his manager.
“Diego had done a great documentary about [world champion] Julio César Chavez, and I had been training a lot in boxing. And we love the sport. Mexico is one of the best countries at boxing. So it was, like, why not let’s tell a story that is very ours?” says García Bernal.
García Bernal plays an aging boxer, Esteban, whose nickname is “La Máquina” (“The Machine”). Luna plays his manager, who is obsessed with plastic surgery. In the story, criminals threaten to kill both of them unless Esteban throws his next match.
“We wanted to tell the story of a boxer [at his] height, in [his] complete success,” says García Bernal, “and realizing that losing is a way to win. That is counter-narrative to [how] the world talks about success and everything. It's when losing becomes winning.”
Luna says he and García Bernal can relate to what boxers go through, not only having to perform, but also constantly going on tour, dealing with managers, agents and promoters.
Fans hope to see more of Diego Luna and Gael García Bernal on screen together, in any language.
Copyright 2024 NPR
