I am a very active audience member. I want to be moved. I want to be confronted. I want to feel.
I've never lived in an English-speaking country, ever, but I lived in Austria. So, my second language is German. And when I went to school, I had a lot of classes in English.
I had to understand the whole bounty hunting thing, because we don't have that in Venezuela. Nothing similar at all, at least not legal.
I think that the 'Bourne Trilogy,' it's definitely redefined the genre and took it to a new level. It was really great to be part of that experience. It is a very smart movie and a very smart script, great director, and great, you know, fellow actors.
Panama is a country that's been dealing with issues of identity since its very birth. It was born on Wall Street. It was born out of engineering construction. It was the canal. Because of the canal, the country was born, so the country has been divided into pro-canal and against-canal people for so long.
One of the pillars of 'Cyrano' is recreating a love story and, like any archetype, these great stories tend to be captivating, among other things, because they are made of those universal things that move us.
Men are taught that if we are not the ultimate provider, we are a complete failure. We have to be number one in everything we do. There is nothing more delusional or paralysing than what I have just described.
I look for roles that allow me to immerse in different worlds, immerse in worlds that are different from mine. Then, when you finish a film, you're a different person. I look for that. I look to be impacted, to be transformed, changed by my roles. That's why I do this.
To portray not only a boxer but a boxer like Roberto Duran, I needed to understand all the difficulties and the pressures of the sport itself.
Duran is a mythological figure in Latin America. He grew up in a time of turbulence because Panama was basically occupied by the United States. So he felt obliged to fight Americans in the ring. He felt the whole pride of his country and the need for cultural and political emancipation in his hands.
We use the term 'fight' very lightly - 'I've been fighting so hard to get my car, I've been fighting so hard to get that job, I've been fighting so hard to get that girl.' But the reality is boxers do fight bitterly to get whatever they want or whatever they need in life, and most of them come from nothing, which is the case of Roberto Duran.
Imagine stepping into the shoes of Roberto Duran, one of the most legendary boxers in the history of the sport, and definitely the most legendary Latin American boxer, and then having 'Raging Bull' in my corner. I mean, imagine that? Just having Robert De Niro to play the trainer in the movie, that was fantastic.
What drew me to the character is that Roberto Duran is the son of an American soldier - a Marine - stationed in Panama and a humble Panamanian mother, and he was abandoned.
Carlos was a character, a character fabricated by Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, fabricated by the secret services of the epoch, fabricated by the governments of the epoch, by the radical groups of the epoch, by the communications media.
I remember when I first met Katherine Bigelow for 'Zero Dark Thirty' - actually, we met for another movie, and that never got made, and then she called me and invited me to 'Zero Dark Thirty'.
Feminism is nothing but equality, and actually, feminism benefits men because it liberates us and it releases us from many stigmas imposed by the macho culture on us as well. So if more of us could understand that it's nothing but equality, I think many agendas in terms of equality would have advanced quicker because it really helps us as well.
I think, for any actor, dealing with the paranormal is intriguing.
We all have very personal relationships to what happened on 9/11 and the events after tracking Osama bin Laden. Nobody can escape from the influence of that.
There's no way to reconstruct reality. It happened once. What you do is reinterpret and recreate. Even if you have the person who lived it and did it next to you, the event happened just once.
That's what happens in a good horror movie: there are always metaphors of greater subjects like humanity and empathy and compassion. It's not about the action and scary moments: You really care about these characters because they're mirrors of our own reflections.
