Diego Luna's star rises with 'Dancing' film

By Terry Lawson
Knight Ridder Newspapers

E-mail this article Print this article Search archive

Detroit's loss was Diego Luna's gain. In 1999, Mexican director Alfonso Cuarón had reserved Detroit locations for a drama about a father who reunites with a son he's never really known, in a film for Miramax. Viggo Mortensen, who had yet to be tapped for "The Lord of the Rings," was set to star.

Then, at the last minute, Miramax decided it wanted to save money by filming in Toronto. Cuarón balked, and the production was canceled.

Licking his wounds, the director of the upcoming "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban" returned to Mexico City and helped his brother finish the script for a road movie about two teenagers and an older woman, which would be titled "Y Tu Mamá También."

An international hit, it jump-started the careers of its two young stars and lifelong friends, Gael Garcia Bernal and 19-year-old Diego Luna.

"I'm very sorry for Detroit, but I am very happy for me," says Luna, who had been acting for 12 years when "Y Tu Mamá También" hit, and has since acted in 11 movies — "more than I had in the entire time before that."

His latest could make the handsome, still-boyish 24-year-old a bona fide star.

"Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights" is not technically a sequel or a prequel to the 1987 hit, in which a young and well-to-do Jennifer Grey fell in love on the dance floor with Patrick Swayze. It's a variation on the theme, with a bookish American teen (played by the British actress Romola Garai, who co-starred in the 2002 adaptation of "Nicholas Nickleby") uncomfortably living in a Cuban hotel with her family in 1958, until she happens on a Havana dance club where hotel waiter Javier (Luna) goes to unwind.

Intrigued by both the sexy salsa and Javier, she asks him for dance lessons, which leads to romance and family tension, not a little of which is tied to the impending revolution.

Luna had never seen "Dirty Dancing" and admits he probably would not have been interested had he not gotten a call from producers Lawrence Bender and Sarah Green.
 
" 'Pulp Fiction' and 'Reservoir Dogs' are two of my favorite movies," says Luna, referring to two of Bender's credits. "And I worked with Sarah on 'Frida' (Luna's first English-language film), so I knew she was very good at what she did. So I took, how do you say it, a leap of faith."

When choreographer JoAnn Jansen, whose experience as a teenager in Cuba inspired the story, first met with Luna, she told director Guy Ferland he was what they were looking for, but there was one slight problem. Luna couldn't dance. Not, he admits, a step.

"Too shy. At weddings, I would just shuffle around if I had to. If I had to get on the floor at a club to continue some conversation with a gal, I would have to have a lot of tequila first."

Luna says he was only slightly encouraged by the fact that Garai had never danced, either, and by the fact that the producers had budgeted for a two-month rehearsal period in Puerto Rico, where the film was to be made. Much of that time was spent with Jansen, sometimes up to eight hours a day.

"Worse than army training, I bet," says Luna. "But after two weeks, I was ready to quit, I was just so terrible. But JoAnn wouldn't give up on me, and I was finally able to learn the one routine that Romola learns for the dance competition. We both had sort of assumed they would just use real dancers for most of the scenes in which you see the footwork, but JoAnn and Guy wanted us to do it all.

"So now I look at the film, and the thing I'm proudest of is that I look like I know what I'm doing."

Luna's father was one of Mexico's most revered theatrical and lighting designers, and his mother, an English-born costume designer, died when Diego was 2. So his father took Diego with him to work almost every night, and the child soon became enthralled with the idea of acting.

"I was a kid, so the idea of telling lies for a living, of playing pretend, was pretty great. I just loved everything about it."

At 7, he had a role in a play called "Intimada," directed by one of his father's friends. Soon after, he was spotted by a casting director and, at age 11, had his first film role, playing a boy who has his first romantic experience with a girl at New Year's Eve party, unaware that his beloved grandfather has died while they were otherwise engaged.

"I start right off with a tragedy," he says, laughing.

Only a few films are made in Mexico every year, and Luna jokes that he was in most of them. In order to live independently — he has been on his own since he was 16 — he worked in Mexican soap operas, a source of some embarrassment when he is spotted in Los Angeles restaurants by members of the kitchen staff, who call out to him by his character's name.

"It's funny that Latin American film is now getting all this international attention because there is so little of it. But it's good, very good. Mexicans rarely got work in Spanish or Argentinian films, but there's more crossing over now, and the attention the movies get at festivals is good for all of us."

The success of "Y Tu Mamá También" has opened what Luna describes as "100 doors" for himself and his costar and childhood friend Bernal.

Luna had a supporting role as Button, a cowboy-in-training in Kevin Costner's 2003 Western "Open Range."

Luna's Mexican heist flick, "Nicotina," was shown at last year's Toronto Film Festival and is expected to get a U.S. distribution deal soon. And he snagged a costarring role with John C. Reilly in producer Steven Soderbergh's English-language remake of the ingenious Argentinian con-man drama "Nine Queens," which will be titled "Criminal."

But most exciting for Luna was being chosen by Steven Spielberg to play a pivotal role in the upcoming "The Terminal," starring Tom Hanks as a traveler whose war-torn Eastern European country collapses while he is abroad, leaving him a man without a country. Lacking a passport, he becomes a de facto citizen of an airport terminal, where he is befriended by Luna, an airport employee.

"Aside from having this incredible opportunity to watch one of the greatest directors alive working and to be part of his project, I got to see someone who has been in this business for 30 years who still takes this great joy in what he does.

"Plus, I get to see that you can be famous and still be a real human being, a nice person who treats people with respect. This gives me great hope, you know."

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company