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GAEL GARCIA BERNAL DISCUSSES PLAYING 'CASSANDRO' IN LUCHA BIOPIC

Deadline has an interview with Gael Garcia Bernal talking about playing and preparing for the lead role in 'Cassandro'. 

How he got involved with the project:

"The standard way. The director came to me, because he’d done a documentary about the real Saúl Armendáriz and his alter ego, Cassandro. He told me he wanted to do a movie about him, and immediately I remembered growing up with Cassandro and all the other luchadors, and I started to get excited by it. But it was still in the works. It was one of those projects that was like, “OK, it might happen eventually.” And then, like all good things, it just started to happen little by little. I forget what led up to that, but there were many, many different factors that helped put it together. I started training six months before — obviously, I was eating a lot and doing a lot of weight and flexibility work, all those kinds of things — and then, a couple of months before shooting, I was doing full-on luchador training. It was amazing, and so much fun."

Did he talk to Cassandro about portraying him: 

"I guess Roger and him had conversations about that. I spoke with Cassandro very little before shooting. We were going to take whatever we knew about Cassandro and kind of make it our own. I mean, his character was already very stylized. It was like, “OK, we have to make something different for the movie.” And then, while we were shooting the film, Cassandro had a head injury, so he was not able to talk for a little while, so I didn’t speak with him until afterwards. But we saw each other when we finished shooting. He was very happy, I think."

Did he get into the real world of Lucha Libre: 

"Yes, of course. Yeah. I trained a lot with an organization called La Triple A, which is one of the biggest organizations in lucha libre in Mexico. They have great wrestlers, and they have many teachers, and they are very strong pillars of the wrestling community. There were two in particular, one called Chessman and another one called El Texano Jr. They were great, and they helped us a lot. They invited us to train with real wrestlers, with the young up-and-coming wrestlers that were training, and so we would do their training too. I’ve got to say, this was one of the most difficult things I’ve ever done in my life. It was very, very hard. Physically I couldn’t keep it up. For example, as a warmup, you have to do 100 deadfalls on your back, so you learn how to fall and not hurt yourself. And they have a lot of that. They have a lot of wrestling training, and a lot of judo training, in order to know how to fall. It has a lot of techniques that are from the acrobatic world as well, like getting into the ring. You learn how to play with the ropes, because you have to know how to hold them, because they can really hurt you."

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