Antonio Banderas, looking to the future “with enthusiasm”, returns to Malaga in September to stage and direct the cult musical ‘Company’. He will collaborate with his daughter Stella del Carmen on the project.
He recently shot the film ‘Official Competition’ in New York together with Penélope Cruz, among others. The film will be presented at the Venice Film Festival, held this year from September 1 to 11.
The Malaga-born actor expressed he wants Stella close by because she is “a girl with personality” and he is very interested in her “artistic vision”.
Banderas will also continue with the Soho television project, which was born in the midst of the pandemic. In addition, his theatre’s symphony orchestra and the musical ‘Company’ are projects underway. The actor calls himself “a fool” to launch all these initiatives at such an inopportune time.
Complicated year
This has been a very complicated year “at all levels and in all professions”, he told EFE. However, “super interesting things have also to be recognised” and the incarceration during the lockdown has increased our self-knowledge.
The Malagueño confessed that for someone like him, who “was constantly in bustle and always surrounded by people”, this time served to detoxify and “rethink life”. He had “never had spent 74 days alone” and “never been all alone”.
Sacrifice
“People in the cultural sector suffer a lot,” explains Banderas. He stated that filling the sets or paying the professionals costs a lot. Yet he wants to continue to do so in the best possible way, albeit with sacrifice.
Fantastic year collapses like house of cards
At the end of 2019, the actor received the Critics Award in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco. With a Goya Award in his hands, and Golden Globe and Oscar nominations “the year (2020) started great”. Moreover, at that time he was shooting a film with Penélope Cruz started and the company travelled with ‘A Chorus Line’ to Barcelona. Then “suddenly the best year of my life collapsed like a house of cards”.
Serious collateral damage
Banderas points out that no one has yet measured what happened and how it will weigh on each of them. But he is sure that in the coming years “information will continue to come in about the things that have happened”. Further, “they will continue to pay the collateral damage resulting from this” and it will be “very serious”, concludes the successful actor and director.
