I had a long conversation with a close friend of Pedro’s, and I asked him if I should speak as though I were imitating a woman, and if I should use rude or foul speech. It was extremely difficult because the frontier between reality and fiction was delicate. You’ve played many difficult roles before. The book has autobiographical parts, but the book is not Pedro, and Pedro is not the book. I think it’s important to point out that my character is not Pedro. We’d crossed paths, but we weren’t close. That was big because it’s not like he and I were friends. He inserted himself into the Chilean political movement of the ‘80s, conscious not to reduce himself to just his sexuality.ġ5 years ago, or more, I don’t remember, Pedro found me in a bar in Santiago to tell me in person that he wanted me to play the role of “la loca de el frente,” and that there was no one else he wanted. Sometimes he’s seen only through his “party” persona, but Lemebel was a man who suffered persecution and discrimination yet managed to subvert that with his creativity and impose his point of view through writing. Not only does he stand up as a key gay, disruptive figure, but in the ‘80s he filled the role of a politician as a participatory, critical and subversive political entity, like his writing continues to do today. In my life on the Chilean stage he is so fundamental. As La Loca says in the movie’s first trailer, dropped last Friday by lead producer Forestero, “I don’t have friends, darlings, I have lovers.”Ĭastro talked to Variety on the eve of Cannes, where “My Tender Matador” was presented at a Marché Producer’s Network event on Monday.Ĭould you talk a bit about the importance of Lemebel in a political and cultural context? In the movie, set in 1986, Castro plays La Loca del Frente, The Queen of the Corner, an aging, lonely, loquacious, physically squalid cross-dresser who lives in a shanty barrio of Santiago, and falls in love with a member of the armed resistance.Ĭastro’s metamorphosis in the novel is large and multi-faceted as the Queen of the Corner rings the option on multiple roles, a self-fashioned martyr of love.

He is looking to do that again playing the lead role in “ My Tender Matador,” among Chile’s biggest upcoming movies and a big-screen adaptation of the only novel of Pedro Lemebel, maybe the most politically transgressive writer to who emerged in the last years Pinochet’s Chile. Star of Venice Golden Lion winner “From Afar,” Castro brings a sense of empathy and humanity to characters sometimes beyond the normal social pale. As an actor, Castro’s transformative powers are evident, from his turn as a coroner’s assistant in “Post Mortem” to Gael Garcia Bernal’s casual chic ad agency boss in “No” to a pederast priest in “The Club,” still justifying his predations.

My tender matador pedro lemebel