admin García Bernal was raised in Guadalajara in a community of actors, including his mother, Patricia Bernal, and his father, José Ángel García, who had a small role in Amores Perros. “I was born in this place where you can be anything in a sense,” says García Bernal of that community. “Like you’re a bit exempt from the rules of society in a way.” He was studying acting at the wildly prestigious Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in London when Iñárritu wanted to cast him. But the school required permission for students to take a long leave. Iñárritu was undeterred. He wanted to work with García Bernal so badly that he concocted a workaround. “I have an uncle in Mexico who is a well-known doctor,” Iñárritu tells me over the phone. “He invented an illness (for Gael), a kind of Mexican bacteria like a giardia in the stomach. Radical infection. He had to lay down. And that’s how he was able to film it.”
After Amores Perros, Cuarón came knocking and quickly cast García Bernal in Y Tu Mamá También. “I wrote him an email and ‘quiubo’ was his greeting. It’s like saying ‘sup,’ and I liked him immediately,” Cuarón says. The coming-of-age movie about class and love in Mexico was an opportunity for García Bernal to work with Luna, a close friend whom he had known since childhood.
In tandem, the films were huge international hits and mainstays on the awards circuits. García Bernal was anointed a breakout star and was immediately offered huge roles. He said no to a lot of them. Many, for the right reasons, he tells me: They weren’t what he wanted to do, or the characters didn’t resonate with him, his culture, or his language. But he said no to some bigger roles for the wrong reasons, too: “I was worried about what people would think,” he says, “or if they’d say I was a bit of a sellout.”
His career could be a playbook for one-for-me and one-for-them, alternating between art for art’s sake and big studio productions. There were roles in Michel Gondry’s The Science of Sleep and Pedro Almodóvar’s Bad Education; playing a rapidly aging dad in M. Night Shyamalan’s thriller Old and singing “Everyone Knows Juanita” as Héctor in the Disney-Pixar animated movie Coco. “I’m really glad I get to work in more Hollywood-type of productions,” García Bernal says. “For some reason, they’re part of a carnival that keeps me going.”
