| Breaking the mould |
| Category: 2007 |
from Stella Magazine / by Kimberly Cutter
Catalina Sandino Moreno - the first Colombian to be nominated for an Oscar … has no intention of being typecast as a Latin lovely ‘with a big accent and black hair’. Which is why, after years of turning down big-name projects, she is so proud of all four films she’s starring in this year. She talks to Kimberly Cutter
Catalina Sandino Moreno believes she has a guardian angel. As a rule, I tend to walk away quickly from people who tell me such things, but Moreno, 26, has a stronger case than most.
Indeed, with an Oscar nomination for best actress for her first film, Maria Full of Grace (2004), and four hotly anticipated films coming out in the next year - including Richard Linklater’s controversial Fast Food Nation, Ethan Hawke’s The Hottest State, and Mike Newell’s adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Love in the Time of Cholera - Moreno may have an entire host of angels watching over her.
‘Everything that has happened to me is so crazy,’ says Moreno. She is the first Colombian ever to be nominated for an Oscar. ‘It’s like a fairytale, you know?’
It certainly sounds like one. Born into a prosperous middle-class family (her mother was a pathologist, her father a cattle breeder), Moreno attended a private British school in Bogotá, and began taking acting lessons to help her overcome her shyness.
She was studying advertising at college in Bogotá and taking drama classes on the side when an anonymous admirer referred her for the casting audition for Maria Full of Grace.
‘Somebody called my mother and told her where I should go, everything,’ she has said. ‘It’s odd that he has never introduced himself to me. Maybe he was an angel. Just someone who appeared in my life and changed it totally.’
Maria Full of Grace - the tragic story of a young, pregnant Colombian drug mule - both wowed critics and catapulted Moreno from a 22-year-old unknown student, who had never had a screen role, to Bogotá’s Great Hollywood Hope.
Suddenly, Moreno was out on all the red carpets, dolled up in Roberto Cavalli with diamonds nestled in her cleavage, or having dinner in Beverly Hills with the likes of Kate Winslet and Cate Blanchett.
The director of The Motorcycle Diaries, Walter Salles, told her he wanted to work with her; an agent promised her a role opposite Al Pacino. But though all of this sounded pretty much like an actor’s idea of nirvana, for Moreno it was also disturbing.
‘The Oscars were insane,’ says Moreno, who moved from Bogotá to the Upper East Side of New York after filming Maria. ‘ Everyone was, like, ” You have to be picture perfect, you have to look like this!”‘
Everyone, it seemed, wanted to turn her into a piece of Latina cheesecake. ‘All these people tried to pitch me movies where it was, like, ” Al Pacino plays this teacher, and you’ll have a scene with him where you’re going to get naked, and you’re going to have sex with him,”‘ Moreno says, laughing. ‘And they were, like, “That’s a great chance for you!”‘
But Moreno didn’t think so. ‘I said, “I don’t want to get naked. I don’t care if it’s Al Pacino or the biggest movie star in the world - I just don’t want to do those types of roles.”‘ Moreno decided to hold out for something more interesting. She had to wait three years.
I am sitting with Moreno in a perky Upper East Side vegan restaurant on a cold, bright March afternoon, eating marinated tofu and listening to her talk about Maria. With her pretty, moon-shaped face, extra-long jeans and glossy black hair tucked up inside a chunky wool ski-hat, Moreno looks more like a college student than a film star.
But you can see the starlet potential none the less. The little waist and curving hips. The toasted-almond skin. The big, sad, sexy-orphan eyes. And this, of course, is the problem. Although Moreno’s skill as an actress is prodigious, put her in a slinky gown and she’s a knockout.
‘Talk about stereotypes,’ she says. ‘I just can’t do it. Anyone can be a beautiful girl. Any girl can do that. It does not interest me. So,’ she says, shrugging, ‘I didn’t do anything for three years. I was waiting for the right roles.’
In youth-obsessed Hollywood, Moreno’s decision seems like an insane gamble. But for her the choice was simple. ‘I feel a responsibility as an actress, and as a Latin and a Colombian.
‘They’re always so poorly portrayed in films and I just don’t want to be a part of that. You’ll never find me in Colombia, playing a guerilla in some drug/action movie - it’s not me. I love my country way too much to contribute to that image. That, for me, is insane.’
Instead, Moreno settled into life in New York with her husband, David Elwell (a lighting technician whom she met on the set of Maria and married last year), jogging in Central Park and watching films by Hitchcock and Fellini.
She also studied at the famed Lee Strasberg Institute. ‘Strasberg was great because it made me comfortable acting in English,’ she says. ‘I was doing Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams - a lot of plays that I really, really liked - and it increased my confidence a lot.’
Then, in 2006, the script for Fast Food Nation arrived. Moreno was riveted. A dark tale that examines the health risks and social consequences involved in the fast-food industry (such as ‘faecal matter’ in the hamburgers and horrifically overworked illegal immigrants in the slaughterhouses), Fast Food Nation is a fictional take on Eric Schlosser’s non-fiction bestseller.
‘I read the script, and I was, like, “Oh, it’s so creepy. I can’t believe this is happening,”‘ says Moreno, who plays Sylvia, a Mexican immigrant who makes a terrifying border crossing into America and finds herself working in an abattoir.
‘I was, like, “I have to do this. This is something I didn’t know about - how many other people don’t know about it?” People should be aware where the food is coming from. It’s terrible.’
One might imagine Fast Food Nation to be a tiresome, do-goody affair full of earnest speeches, but Linklater is too smart for that.
Bristling with dark humour, clear-eyed intelligence and remarkable sympathy for even its most despicable characters, Fast Food Nation (which also stars Greg Kinnear, Patricia Arquette and Ethan Hawke) is not just a film with a message; it’s also damned entertaining.
‘Rick [Linklater] is so great that way,’ says Moreno. ‘He respects his characters and trusts his actors. That’s why his films are so good.’
Moreno gives a moving, dead-on performance in the film - one that she credits to her lack of research into the conditions in slaughterhouses. ‘This character gets thrown into a world that she doesn’t know anything about,’ says Moreno, who saw the film as another potent illustration of the dangers that immigrants face in their quest to pursue the American dream.
‘So I approached it the same way I approached Maria. I didn’t talk to anyone beforehand about what it was going to be like - I didn’t want to be prepared. I wanted the shock to be real, and it was,’ she continues, explaining that she no longer eats meat in America, though she relishes the occasional steak when she’s home in Colombia.
‘They were killing cows [in the slaughterhouse were Fast Food Nation was being filmed], and there was blood, and although I’m not that kind of person who says, “Oh my God, blood! That’s awful!” it is really cold-blooded how they kill these cows and just slash them down the middle. It’s completely shocking.’
But despite Moreno’s dedication to, in her words, ’socially realistic’ films, she isn’t above a little romance - just so long as it’s a ‘really good’ romance.
In The Hottest State, directed by and starring Ethan Hawke, Moreno plays her first romantic lead, a singer/songwriter opposite a struggling young actor played by Mark Webber.
‘The part was written for a Caucasian girl,’ explains Moreno, ‘and then Ethan met me, and he saw past the black hair and black eyes. He felt that I could be her, and that meant so much to me because I adore it when I get these weird roles that are not a Latina woman who has a big accent and some black hair. I can’t deal with those any more.’
At times Moreno - who is fond of sweeping generalisations and exclamations such as ‘Amazing!’ and ‘Terrible!’ and ‘Oh my God!’ - can sound a bit hypocritical.
One could argue that the ‘embattled immigrant Latina’ role is as much a stereotype as the ‘Latina sexpot’. And there is not, to my knowledge, a whole lot of social realism going on in Love in the Time of Cholera.
But in essence, what Moreno seems to be saying is that she wants to play multi-faceted characters. She does not want to be the Latina film star with the hot bod; she wants to be a great actress, full stop.
Viewed in this light, her film choices make a lot of sense. Shortly after she finished filming The Hottest State, Moreno got a call from the Brazilian director Walter Salles, inviting her to be the star in his segment of the forthcoming film Paris, je t’aime (in which 20 filmmakers - including the Coen Brothers and Wes Craven - were given five minutes to tell a story about love in Paris).
Moreno plays a poor nanny in an upper-class family, torn between her love for the child she cares for and her love for her own child. Not long after, while Moreno was on location in Spain, she got an email saying that Mike Newell, the director of Love in the Time of Cholera, was going to be in Madrid to meet Javier Bardem.
‘I freaked out,’ gushes Moreno, who calls Love in the Time of Cholera her ‘favourite book of all time’. ‘I was, like, “Oh my God, I have to do it, I need to be part of this movie, I don’t care what role they give me.”‘
She travelled by car and train from one end of Spain to the other for the interview and wound up with the supporting female lead. It’s a fantastic role, but one indubitably secured by her South American heritage. ‘I just wanted to be something, anything, that was part of that project.’
And now? Moreno smiles. ‘I’m in talks about a few projects, but nothing is firm at the moment.’ She pauses for a moment. ‘It’s funny,’ she says. ‘I came back from Colombia a few months ago, and I kind of freaked out. I was, like, “Oh my God, I don’t have a job!” but then I remembered that I can wait. I know how to wait now. I know how to be patient.’
She smiles. ‘So I’ll be here, circling, waiting. I’m like a shark. I won’t go away.’
- ‘Fast Food Nation’ opens on Friday
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