Fele & the Bad Education

The 30-year-old actor is a bundle of nervous energy and he looks years younger with his hair cropped short and large, liquid puppy-dog eyes. With his co-star Gael Garcia Bernal -- who enjoys three showy roles in the film, including that of a cross-dressing femme fatale – continuing to get the bulk of journalists' attention, the slender Martinez is definitely the thinner half of the Bad Education equation. But Pedro Almodovar’s latest masterpiece, which is new today on DVD, belongs to him as much as his flamboyant co-star.

Indeed, it is Martinez as film director Enrique who pulls us along into the heart of Bad Education's mystery.

Always a critical favorite, Almodovar has enjoyed some of the best notices of his storied career for Bad Education, a noir romp that jumps back through time as Enrique seeks to unlock a puzzle that leads back to his Catholic childhood. The movie received seven European Film nominations and an Independent Spirit Award nod for Best Foreign Film.

Though Spain declined to name the film as its Oscar representative in the Best Foreign Language Film category (an honor given to the eventual ’04 winner, Alejandro Amenabar's The Sea Inside), it is as worthy of plaudits as Talk to Her, which garnered Almodovar a Best Original Screenplay award and Best Director nomination a couple of years back.

Talk to Her was also the film that launched Martinez’s association with his country’s most celebrated cinematic auteur, in the form of the small part of Alfredo. The actor, who insists that his aim is to work with only the best of directors, has been a bit spoiled perhaps by his early association with Amenabar, with whom he made two of his first three movies, Thesis and Open Your Eyes. It was for his role in the former as a student obsessed with gore that Martinez won a Goya Award for Best New Actor.

Martinez has made two dozen films in less than a decade, having even found time recently to also appear in the critically lambasted ghost story Darkness. And even though it is the clarion call of a screenplay to be directed by Almodovar or Amenabar that still most excites him as an actor, he almost said no this time around to Pedro.

"I was on the verge of saying, 'This is impossible for me, I can't do it,'" recalls Martinez, during an interview with FilmStew last fall. “When I finished reading the script, I was so surprised. I thought, 'Oh my God, this is a lot of work.' This is a movie that forces you to think.’"

“The relationships are so extremely, extremely hot and feelings are on the edge,” he continues. “My relationship with Angel [Bernal] is so hard, because they are both always hiding things from the other and both try to discover what the other is hiding, Angel's ambition and the nervous curiosity of Enrique."

Taking the part, Martinez realized, meant putting his own acting philosophy to the test. He laughs as he explains, "I don't like to make art that would be easy for me. I want to learn as much as possible and I like it when the character has a lot of difficulties. I like the challenge of overcoming those obstacles."

Much has been made of the challenges that co-star Bernal faced in signing on to Bad Education. The Mexican actor had to learn to speak with a Spanish accent; both gain and lose weight, according to the demands of his three roles; and become adept at playing a believable transsexual. While Martinez wasn't under that kind of linguistic or physical pressure, the less showy role of Enrique still presented its own unique requirements.

For one thing, while Almodovar has said that the movie is not autobiographical, it is a story close to his heart, a screenplay that he worked on for over a decade, and Martinez is playing a young, gay director in 1980, precisely the moment when his director was releasing his first feature, Pepi, Luci, Bom and Other Girls from the Heap.

Martinez and the director talked through the issue. The actor says he was adamant on the subject, "I didn't want to act 'Pedro Almodovar.'”

The director agreed, so the two set about creating a unique character, one where the only traces of Almodovar that remained were the superficial similarities. "We never tried to play Enrique from Pedro's perspective," Martinez says proudly.

With that issue resolved, Martinez threw himself into researching the role. Back in 1980, after all, he was just a toddler. The milieu in which Bad Education is set is smack in the middle of the ‘Movida,’ the cultural earthquake that shook Spain in the wake of dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco's 1975 death. The country embraced its newfound freedom in all senses of the word, politically, sexually, and artistically.

Martinez felt that in order to play Enrique, he had to understand him and the place and time from, which he sprung. That meant giving himself a crash course in the 1980s and the Movida. He describes the run-up to shooting the film as intense, but he still took the time outside of rehearsals to immerse himself in the movies, documentaries, books, and magazines of Enrique's time.

"The character is much more complete, because of all that background," Martinez observes. "I felt that I had to do it. Pedro demands it of you; you have to offer him a lot. But it was great. The other possibility was to read the script and then talk with Pedro. That's fine, but it wouldn't be honest for me or for Pedro or for the rest of the crew that worked so hard."

Martinez took the same approach to preparing for the gay aspect of the role. Intent on appearing natural the minute the cameras started rolling, the actor admits, that, "I fooled around, acting like a queen, acting gay outside the movie, playing around, playing the part."

The actor says one particular scene presented him with his biggest challenge. On the face of it, the sequence sounds simple enough as Martinez merely had to sit still and subtly react as another character shares with Enrique life-altering information. But that stillness gave him fits.

"All that time when I'm sitting, listening to him, it was difficult, because one thing I like to see in other actors, one thing that I really admire, is when the actor expresses something without moving a muscle in the face,” he explains. “That was what was required of me in that scene, and I was scared I wouldn't be able to [do it]."

The completed film astounds him. He is not sure how long he sat in stunned silence the first time he saw it, but he remembers Lola Garcia, Almodovar's assistant asking him if he liked it. Oh yes, he exclaims. "I was amazed, completely amazed, in shock,” he says. “The film was coming out from the screen in all different directions. It was amazing and I was so, so, so happy."

Having risen to every challenge Almodovar and Bad Education put before him, Martinez says the experience remains transforming. "Enrique is the fullest, most mature character I've ever done,” he insists. “Now I feel that I can do anything. I feel so confident. I grew up with this movie." Martinez recently played the Woody Allen role in Play It Again, Sam on stage, which temporarily satisfied his comic desires, but he yearns to do more. On film, he has always been a dramatic actor, which surprises him.

"I always saw myself as a comedian, but I don't know,” he says. “Nobody calls me to make a comedy. I thought, 'What is happening to me?' I need to make that comedy," he pleads only half-jokingly, adding for emphasis, "I. Want. To. Make. A. Comedy. Please!"

Ebullient and humorous, Martinez certainly has the makings of a fine comic actor, so he will probably get his wish. And while Bernal was the one soaking up ink as one of filmdom's current It boys, it was Martinez who received an Audience Award nomination for Best Actor at the 2004 European Film Awards.