Clad in an impeccable dark suit, a middle-aged man carrying a briefcase emerges from his palatial white mansion in the suburbs of Toledo, Spain. With a sense of purpose, he climbs into his sleek sports car and zooms toward the gated exit. Cut to a university lecture hall, where the same man, the eminent Dr. Robert Ledgard, takes control of the podium and the crowd. Little does his audience suspect that this brilliant plastic surgeon, an expert in transgenesis and facial transplants, has a dark secret. Beneath his cultivated, polished veneer lies a psychopath.
In his latest role, Antonio Banderas explores the inner workings of an otherwise mad scientist in Pedro Almodóvar's dazzlingly Byzantine sci-fi- thriller-meets-family-drama, "The Skin That I Live In," which premiered in Cannes last May and opens across Europe later this summer and fall.
In what could be called a return to his Spanish roots and auteur films, Mr. Banderas's unsettling performance of Dr. Ledgard as a kind of modern Dr. Frankenstein bears little resemblance to the blockbuster action heroes he has played over the past two decades in Hollywood. There isn't a trace of the swashbuckling Zorro swagger, and no sexy accent in his native tongue. Even the actor's bankable passionate gaze has turned from smoldering to icy cold, like the scalpel he uses on his human experiment.
Reunited with Mr. Almodóvar for the first time since his role in the 1990 film "Tie Me Up, Tie Me Down," the 50-year-old Malaga-born actor says he is thrilled to be back shooting in Spain, where his Los Angeles-based production company, Green Moon, has just teamed up with a Spanish conglomerate, Vertice 360, and French Quinta Communications for three of his coming film projects.
"It has been very refreshing to work with Pedro again, like a glass of water," Mr. Banderas says. Tanned, fit and youthful-looking, he's casually dressed in khakis, a white T-shirt and sneakers. Off-screen, the actor speaks softly, nearly drowned out by the throbbing bass from a poolside party on the rooftop of a Cannes hotel, where the interview is being held.
His close friendship and collaboration with Mr. Almodóvar began 32 years ago, at the height of La Movida, the explosive artistic movement during Spain's post-Franco transition years, when the director first noticed Mr. Banderas on stage in Madrid, playing a part in a Lope de Vega play.
After their first meeting in a café, where Mr. Almodóvar immediately told the actor that he "could play major romantic leads," Mr. Banderas was given a short audition.
"I liked the way he looked physically, and I was looking for dark-haired boys in my second movie 'Labyrinth of Passion,'" Mr. Almodóvar says, recalling the encounter. "He's walking in the street and crosses paths with someone—it was a guy—he looks back at him over his shoulder. The only thing I asked of him was to look with desire. He did it perfectly." Mr. Banderas went on to appear in four of Mr. Almodóvar's films ("Matador," "Law of Desire," "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown" and "Tie me up! Tie me Down!") and his international film career was launched.
"Almodóvar still hasn't become a crowd-pleaser, nor does he try to give the audience what they expect of him," Mr. Banderas says. "As a director, he's more profound and complex in content, more austere and minimalist in the form. The film is a strange mixture that goes from Shakespeare to soap opera."
An adaptation of the 2003 literary thriller "Mygale" (Tarantula) by Thierry Jonquet, "The Skin I Live In" brings viewers into Dr. Ledgard's secret compound, a clinic/laboratory in the cellar of his sumptuous home. Here, he experiments his groundbreaking research with skin transplants on a hypnotically beautiful young woman, Vera (Elena Anaya), whom he locks away in a windowless room and drugs with opium. Garbed in only a transparent clinging body suit, Vera spends her lonely hours meditating in yoga positions or making sculptures, knowing that the doctor is spying on her through hidden cameras.
Then the movie flashes back six years, introducing Dr. Ledgard's family members in a tangle of violent events, touching on everything from rape and revenge to identity and gender changes, interspersed with Mr. Almodóvar's characteristic touches of wicked comedy and overwrought passion.
"Pedro was very specific, very demanding and careful not to create a monster out of my character," says Mr. Banderas. "He gave me a lot of material to play with, but from the beginning, I was told to keep it very minimalist, very controlled. The tendency—for any actor and definitely mine—is to make the character bigger, more theatrical. You want to shine in every shot. But no—you're performing a gynoplasty, but you have to play it like a family doctor, prescribing aspirins.
"We were all pushed to the limit in this film," he adds. "It's a totally different way of working than in Hollywood, where money is the center of everything, so you have to do products that are sellable and…very easily edible."
Antonio Banderas is no stranger to the intense commercial pressures of L.A., and is the first to admit that he has made "a few mistakes" in his American film career, which began in the early '90s. With screen credits as diverse as an appearance in Madonna's "Truth or Dare" and as Tom Hanks's lover in "Philadelphia," Mr. Banderas went on to play roles in Neil Jordan's "Interview with the Vampire," Roberto Rodriguez's "Desperado," "Evita" and then skyrocketed to fame with mega-hits, from "The Mask of Zorro" and its sequel, "The Legend of Zorro," to the "Spy Kids" series. More recently, he appeared as an urbane art gallery owner in Woody Allen's "You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger," and has lent his voice to Shrek's feline hero, Puss in Boots, since 2004.
And he is proud of it. No one could have ever predicted, he says, that José Antonio Domínguez Bandera—son of a policeman and a school teacher, and a high-school drop-out—would arrive in the U.S. barely speaking a word of English (he memorized his first role phonetically in 1992 for "Mambo Kings") and go on to make over 40 films. "It's weird," he says. "Up until the time I was 31 years old, in Spain, I still didn't know how I was going to pay the rent. Now, 20 years later, I'm donating huge sums to charity for the use of my yacht."
Married for the past 15 years to actress Melanie Griffith, the couple met while shooting "Two Much" in 1996. For his directorial debut, Mr. Banderas cast his wife in the starring role in the comedy "Crazy in Alabama" (1999), and later went on to direct "Summer Rain" (2006), a poetic coming-of-age drama set in southern Spain of the 1970s, based on the novel by Antonio Soler.
Mr. Banderas is positively ebullient about his third directorial project. The time has come, the actor says, to direct a movie on his native turf in Malaga. Slated for 2012, "Solo" is about the solitude and trauma of a colonel in the Spanish army who has returned from Afghanistan.
As he gets ready to return behind the camera, the actor isn't sitting still. After completing the filming for the 1930s oil-boom drama "Black Gold" by French director Jean-Jacques Annaud, slated for European release in November 2011, Mr. Banderas is busy preparing for another starring role in Spanish. The $35 million pan-European-production "Automata," to be directed by Gabe Ibáñez, will be shooting later this year in Tunisia and Egypt. Described as a futuristic film noir, the story depicts human civilization being overtaken by artificial intelligence after the earth's eco-system nearly collapses. "It won't be filmed in the American way," Mr. Banderas says. "Ibáñez's auteur approach may give audiences the chance to discover the new Spanish cinema."
The actor's production company in Grenada also has a second animation 3-D feature in the works, called "Goleor," and is collaborating with French director Luc Besson's team to research faster, cheaper 3-D technology. And later this fall, the actor will return to the stage to work again with director David Leveaux (whose 2003 musical "Nine" earned Mr. Banderas a Tony nomination) to star in the Broadway revival of "Zorba." "I long to get back into theater," he says, "because, believe it or not, it's where I get the most rest. I can't go anywhere! If someone asks me to fly to Japan for an event, I say, 'Sorry, I have to be on stage tonight at 7.' You can do normal things like take your kid to school or read newspapers in the morning and sleep in the same bed every night, which is something I haven't been able to do for the past three years of my life."
But he won't get to stay in that bed long. Mr. Banderas will be traveling the world this year, promoting his forthcoming Shrek spinoff, "Puss in Boots."
Isn't returning to play a swashbuckling cat a contradiction of his artsy new direction? "Films should be for everybody," the actor says. "There must also be movies for a guy who works in construction and hauls bricks all week. On Saturday night, all he wants to do is take his girlfriend to the movie theater, buy a big tub of popcorn and have a good time. 'Puss in Boots' gives me the opportunity to laugh at myself, in the same way that 'Zorro' does."
Chris Miller, the director of "Puss in Boots" says that the fact that Mr. Banderas can do a film by Almodóvar and "Puss in Boots" at the same time shows his versatility: "He seems to have a foot everywhere; he's all over the place," he says. "And he's even funnier than 10 years ago."
This sentiment is shared by Mr. Almodóvar. "Antonio has grown up," he says. "But he's still the happy and playful person I knew in the past."The admiration is mutual. "Working with Pedro is, in some strange way, a religious thing—it's almost an act of faith," Mr. Banderas says. "You have to close your eyes…and just believe."