Gael García Bernal: 'The pandemic has taught me that I need something to say'

He's played a revolutionary hero, a horny teen - now Gael Garcia Bernal is a reptilian choreographer in Ema, and locked down in Mexico city. Just don't ask him to move to LA when all this is over

At the start of the century, the director Alfonso Cuaron was casting Y Tu Mama Tambien, the bawdy but plangent road movie he had written with his brother Carlos about two oversexed Mexican teenagers, the wealthy Tenoch and his poorer, grungier friend Julio. Alfonso called me very excitedly," recalls Carlos Cuaron. He said: I know who's going to play Julio! I've seen him in Alejandro's movie.'" Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, that is, whose ferocious dog-fighting drama Amores Perros was about to be released. I said: No, no, I've found Julio; I saw the perfect actor in this short film, De Tripas, Corazon. He's incredible: his eyes, the way he manages silence ...'"

Eventually, the brothers realised they were talking about the same person: Gael Garcia Bernal, who was then just 21. The son of theatre actors, he had become a star in his early teens on the Mexican soap opera El Abuelo y Yo (Grandpa and I) before decamping to London to study at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. Inarritu plucked him out mid-term for Amores Perros and he stole that movie as the twitchy-hipped tearaway who was every bit as feral as his champion rottweiler. His mutable features could switch from cherubic to lupine to gravely smouldering; his nerve endings felt exposed like frayed electrical wires.