Do we like Antonio Banderas?
Our score: 8 out of 10. Decent record with a track of speaking up for migrants and respecting gay roles; the score stops short of 9 because the record on recent projects is thin.
Banderas is a Málaga native, and after years abroad he's back home running a theatre there. He broke through as a Spanish actor who hit Hollywood and spent a stretch being cast as the villain. These days he splits his work roughly evenly between international projects and Spain, with a film called Tony out in the US this August.
The Hollywood part of his story is a good one. In a March interview with The Times of London, he recalled studio executives telling him that Black and Hispanic actors were there to play the bad guys. A few years later he was Zorro, in the mask and cape, and the villain was the blond, blue-eyed one.
The newest stoush is boring but real. Spain's consumer ministry is reportedly looking into a group of celebrities, Banderas among them, after a users' association report alleged some posts didn't clearly flag paid advertising. No sanctions had been reported at the time, and the Olive Press carried no reply from him on that. The fines on offer can be big for serious offences, so watch this space.
Separately, in May he rejected reports that losses at his Málaga theatre had put him at risk of financial ruin. He said the venue is a private non-profit with no public subsidies and that he can cover the deficits. “I'm not ruined—I'm at full throttle!” is the line that made the headlines.
On the harm test, he looks clean. In January he told Cadena SER he'd never seen anything as shameful as the “gang of thugs” he said Trump's administration had created in ICE. On gay roles, he has told the press he tries to live the characters rather than perform them, and he says he tries to be respectful of the gay community. Nothing on climate turned up either way, and the record on his recent projects is thin, so that's a gap rather than a pass.
The good stuff is quieter. He has said publicly that he owes his life to a drag queen, and he keeps a non-profit theatre going out of his own pocket rather than chasing profit. Not a saint's halo, but a bloke who keeps showing up for the people on the margins.