from V / by Christopher Thomas

HER DEBUT PERFORMANCE GAVE HER AN OSCAR NOMINATION. BUT COLOMBIAN ACTRESS CATALINA SANDINO MORENO IS PROVING THAT INCREDIBLE WORK IS THE ONLY ENCORE

“You’re too beautiful to be working in a factory.” That’s what one character tells Catalina Sandino Moreno’s character in Maria Full of Grace, the 2004 film about a struggling Colombian girl who gets caught up in the international cocaine trade. He’s smooth-talking her into becoming a drug mule, but he is onto something. In a crowded factory scene, your eye is immediately drawn to Moreno. The 25-year-old actress has presence. In person, her English is perfect, perhaps due to her education at a British school in Bogotá, or from living for the past four years in New York with her husband and studying acting at the Lee Strasberg Institute. What’s most noticeable about the way she speaks is her precision and quick mind.

Moreno received a 2004 best-actress Oscar nomination for her work in Maria, especially impressive for a debut performance, let alone the fact that she was the first actress nominated for an Oscar in a Spanish-speaking role. She has been conspicuously invisible since, but in the coming year she’ll star in five prominent movies: a love story (the lead in Ethan Hawke’s The Hottest State), a thriller (Journey to the End of the Night), a period piece (a starring turn in The Heart of the Earth, about tensions in a Spanish mining town), and two more social commentaries (Walter Salles’s section of Paris, Je T’aime and Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation).

The first to be released is Fast Food Nation, the fictional version of the exposé of the fast-food industry. Linklater described it as “a character study of the lives behind the facts and figures,” and Moreno plays an undocumented worker in a meatpacking plant. Shortly after this interview was conducted, the actress traveled to Colombia to begin shooting her biggest upcoming role, a costarring turn in Love in the Time of Cholera (which, like all but one of her upcoming films, is English-language). She plays Hildebranda Sanchez, the heroine’s cousin and best friend. Finally, in this adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, Moreno will be playing a Latin American character with no ties to the cocaine trade. She won’t be a drug mule or an exploited undocumented worker, she’ll just be a woman dealing with a fifty-year love triangle. Christopher Thomas

CHRISTOPHER THOMAS Tell me about your character in Fast Food Nation.
CATALINA SANDINO MORENO She’s an immigrant from Mexico who comes to the U.S. with her sister and boyfriend, and like any immigrant, she wants a better life. She finds herself caught in a situation of having to work in a slaughterhouse to survive, which is not at all what she was planning to do. It’s a story of survival, how people have to do whatever it takes to survive in this country.

CT What kind of research did you do?
CSM I just read the book. I didn’t think this character needed much research because, like in Maria, she doesn’t know what’s going to happen to her. If I were playing a pianist, I would take piano lessons and just dedicate my time to the piano, but this character doesn’t know how a slaughterhouse looks or how they kill the animals. She’s new to America.

CT So you never visited an actual slaughterhouse?
CSM I did eventually visit a slaughterhouse with a camera, which actually helped a lot. The smell of a slaughterhouse is so strong, just blood. Then you notice a big box full of heads of cows. It was not that hard for me, actually, because my father is a veterinarian, and he has a farm with cattle. Every time a cow died, he would open it up and show me why it had died. But the film was shot in a working slaughterhouse. The line was moving. They were killing cows while we were doing our scenes. My job was to clean the intestines, which is very… [Scrunches up face, laughs] And I did.

CT Did your eating habits change after reading Fast Food Nation?
CSM I just need to know where my food comes from. I’m much more careful after reading the book. I’m not going to buy meat from the corner store. But I eat everything. My mother is a vegetarian, so I grew up not eating meat. Then I went to Brazil and was like “I’m just going to have a little taste.” The meat there is fabulous, so I kept eating it all the time. Plus I was really needing the iron.

CT Why are you drawn to such political movies?
CSM I feel I have a responsibility, as an actress, as a Colombian immigrant, and just as a person, to show people reality. It would be nice to be an actress who loves action movies, but I’m not that kind of actress. Maybe because my first chance was Maria, and I felt how people reacted. People enjoyed Maria, they were entertained by it, and they learned something. The more real and raw, the more I’m naturally drawn to the character. Though don’t get me wrong, I love Batman and King Kong and all these big movies, too. Who knows, hopefully I’ll be in one of those big special-effects movies one day. But right now, it’s important to show people what’s happening in the world.

CT After the Oscar nomination, you must have received a lot of scripts.
CSM Actually, I didn’t. After Maria, I didn’t work for three years.

CT Strange.
CSM Strange. [Laughs] I didn’t receive much. Well, I received roles that were very light. Like the Colombian drug dealer and the sexy Latin girl. Maria had such an impact on me that I didn’t want to do something so light. I wanted to do something with power. Anyone can be a beautiful girl. Any girl can be that. So I didn’t do anything for three years. I was waiting for the right roles. And in the past year, everything has been happening so fast.

CT You alluded to stereotypes of sexy Latin girls. Have you encountered a lot of stereotyping in the business?
CSM Of course. People have stereotypes. If in the script it says “Caucasian woman,” they just look at Caucasians, not beyond that. The script Ethan [Hawke] wrote [for his adaptation of his debut novel] was for a Caucasian woman, but he sent me the script, and I was so glad and proud and thankful. He saw beyond the color of skin and accent and everything. He just wanted a good actress.

CT Because Gabriel García Márquez is such an institution and Love in the Time of Cholera is so special to so many people, fans must be very attached to the characters.
CSM It is special. I read that book three times before I even knew anyone was going to make a movie. I thought adapting it would be impossible, but the script is perfect. Every single detail I loved about the book is in the script.

CT Do you have any ideas about how you’re going to approach
Hildebranda?
CSM Not yet. I just got back from shooting a movie in Spain for four months, so I still have to work on Love. I have the book, so I will read it.

CT For the fourth time.
CSM And I’ll be glad to read it for the fourth time. But now I can concentrate on her. I think I have to do some work with my body, physically. Not changing it, but to learn how to be old. I don’t know if I’ll need help from a teacher, but a big part of my preparation will be just really believing that I could be 70.
Fast Food Nation is out in October 2006 from Fox Searchlight Pictures