The scene that almost killed Antonio Banderas: “We were playing with our lives”
Depending on how old you are, you probably know Antonio Banderas from one of two things.
Older moviegoers will know him as the masked swordsman in the rebooted Zorro movies, while younger fans will recognise him as the voice of Puss in Boots from the Shrek franchise and its associated spin-offs.
But there’s more to the Spaniard than his swashbuckling. He’s a favourite of Pedro Almodóvar, having appeared in a number of his most prominent films. He was excellent in Babygirl, playing the cuckolded husband of Nicole Kidman’s character, and he was even nominated for a Tony for his role in the musical Nine.
Action is still his bread and butter, however. His sword-wielding, bullet-spraying roles are numerous, from the box office flop The 13th Warrior to the cult favourite Spy Kids movies to joining the dozens of ageing stars searching for a payday in the Expendables franchise. Being a well-seasoned man of action, Banderas knows all too well just how blurred the line can become between on-screen violence and real-life tragedy.
Speaking with Entertainment Weekly, the dashing star spoke about his experience on the set of the film Desperado. While watching a scene where he and his co-star, Salma Hayek, were fighting baddies on a rooftop, he explained that it wasn’t just the characters that were in mortal danger.
“We were playing there with our lives, literally,” he said. “We were at the top of this building, they were just holding me with a rope that then they erased. I don’t know if we’re gonna get to that point. They explode behind us – look at this. We are jumping here. Now, that’s her holding from a crane, off a guy who was doing construction around the area. This is nothing prepared”.
Adding, “You know, somebody was holding me with a rope there. And then I jump backwards in the same crane to just crash against the other building [laughs]. So, and now there is an explosion, and I don’t know how – I mean, the heat behind us was so intense that it burned a little bit of my hair.”
Desperado is the second instalment in director Robert Rodriguez’s so-called ‘Mexico trilogy. The first entry, El Mariachi, is named after Banderas’ character and became a surprise hit at the box office. In this second entry, the gun-toting hero goes on a bloody rampage in response to the death of his girlfriend at the hands of a ruthless drug lord. Hayek plays El Mariachi’s companion and received considerable attention in the English-language market for the first time.
It doesn’t even take a complicated action sequence for something to go wrong. On the set of The Expendables 3, Banderas hurt himself on the first day of filming simply by running towards a helicopter. On a very different note, Jason Statham almost died while making that film when the brakes failed on a truck he was driving, and he ended up plunging into the Black Sea. Hopefully the sea was OK…
It’s easy to forget just how dangerous action sequences are. It doesn’t take much for something to go horribly wrong, especially if people don’t know what they’re doing. Luckily, Banderas definitely knows what he’s doing. Even if running in a straight line isn’t as easy as it used to be.
