October 22, 2015
In The Mix

Hitting a High Note

Gael Garcia Bernal finds his way through the Jungle.

Amy Amatangelo

As a child in Mexico, there was one thing Gael García Bernal knew he didn’t want to be: an actor.

The son of a director father and an actress mother, theater surrounded him. “It’s like a curse. I wanted to escape from it,” says the star of Amazon’s Mozart in the Jungle. “I felt I had to do something else.”

So he studied philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. When the students there went on strike, Bernal went to London and eventually landed at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. “I came to the realization, ‘Okay, I’ll become an actor,’” he says.

“I’m now proud of that decision.”

Bernal describes Rodrigo, the impish and brilliant maestro he plays in Mozart, as someone who, when he enters a room, has to touch all four walls.

“He’s really fun to play because you can do anything,” he says. “It’s exhausting as well, because I know that the character needs to do things all the time. He represents a generation of people who have no boundaries.”

To convincingly portray an artist at the pinnacle of a conducting career, Bernal studied the music heard in the series as if he were learning another language. “I would learn it phonetically almost,” he explains.

Bernal broke out in the 2001 film Y Tu Mamá También, directed by Alfonso Cuarón (Gravity). He considers Cuarón and director Alejandro González Iñárritu (who recently won three Oscars for Birdman and directed Bernal in Amores Perros) his film family. “I was just going crazy with emotion [when Alejandro won],” he says.

Bernal, who can next be seen in the film Desierto, is also prepping for season two of Mozart. “I miss [Rodrigo],” he says. “I feel like I have a more or less regular job for the first time in my life and that’s very exciting.”

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