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The Reluctant Star
Actor Andy Garcia chooses Roles that rouse his Passions and Cement his Reputation as one of Hollywood's most likable NonConformists
By Gordon Mott
Flee your homeland when you’re five years old,
never to return. Grow up hearing of a life lost in Cuba, of a country that
over the years fades into a collage of mirages, of a land that when
mentioned brings tears to your eyes. Imagine that personal journey, and you
may glimpse some of what makes actor Andy Garcia who he is. You begin to
understand why he’s been struggling for 10 years to finance a film
called The Lost City about Havana in the years before Fidel
Castro’s revolution.
“You have certain scars
from when you were 10 years old. You carry those scars with you and
subconsciously you make decisions off of those things,” Garcia says. “There is a
reason I want to tell the story of The Lost City. America has given me an
extraordinary opportunity to explore my dreams, and my father made great
sacrifices for me to have that opportunity. That’s why we left the
country that we loved, because freedom is not negotiable.
“I only get involved in things that I get
stoked about,” says Garcia, trying to explain a project like The Lost
City, which was written by exiled Cuban writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante.
“When I see material that I get passionate about, I go with
it.”
That’s Garcia’s career in a nutshell.
In the late 1980s, while in his early 30s, the Cuban-American actor had
Hollywood in the palm of his hand. Roles such as federal agent George Stone
in 1987’s The Untouchables, opposite Kevin Costner and Sean Connery;
as investigator Raymond Avila in 1990’s Internal Affairs, opposite
Richard Gere; and as hotheaded Vincent Mancini in The Godfather: Part III
the same year put him on the fast track to superstardom. He inherited the
thinking woman’s sex symbol mantle from Clark Gable, Connery and Al
Pacino. He was considered for nearly every action hero or sexy male lead in
big-budget movies at the time. His celebrity seemed sudden, and, to him,
overwhelming. Not that the brush with fame was not enticing. Garcia had
endured years of struggle and rejection in Hollywood, often with hints
about or even direct barbs at his ethnicity, before he scored what he
considers his first major role as Ray Martinez in The Mean Season in
1985. In the end, he didn’t succumb to the lure of easy money and
fame.
“It’s always been my nature to shy away
from overexposure, and the first onslaught of fame, when it came from those
pictures, I did not embrace it. I went the other way,” Garcia says.
“I felt that you lose something; there’s a price you pay by
just letting yourself into that world. They might pay you a lot of money,
but…you ask, is it really what you want? I did not become an actor to
do those kinds of movies.”
Sporting a well-worn, bulky tan coat, Garcia runs his
fingers through his thick tousled hair. Even as he talks, the surroundings
echo his words. He sits in the backyard of a small bungalow in a
residential neighborhood in Sherman Oaks, California, out in the valley,
over a range of hills from Beverly Hills. This modest home, which now
houses his production company, Cineson, was the place where he raised his
family until a few years ago. You could drive by and miss it, sitting amid
a long row of single-story, ranch-style homes on a tranquil street.
But the quiet persona, and the devotion to smaller,
independent-style movies, doesn’t mean that Garcia shuns big-studio
movies with star-studded casts and subjects designed to appeal to
mass-market audiences. He played casino executive Terry Benedict in
2001’s gambling heist remake Ocean’s 11, opposite George
Clooney, Brad Pitt and Matt Damon, and this April he begins filming its
sequel, Ocean’s 12, with the same cast plus a still-secret extra cast
member. And, he can currently be seen in the Paramount release Twisted with
Ashley Judd and Samuel L. Jackson. In the film, Judd plays Jessica Shepard,
a homicide detective whose past lovers wind up dead. Garcia portrays her
partner, Mike Delmarco, who, along with the police commissioner (Jackson),
begins to believe she may be the serial killer. “So I try not to
sleep with [her],” Garcia says with a grin.
Garcia decided to take the part in the thriller
after getting a call from the director, Philip Kaufman, whose last film was
the critically acclaimed Quills in 2000. “For me, it was all about
Phil Kaufman. He’s done some extraordinary films—The Unbearable
Lightness of Being, The Right Stuff. It was an opportunity to watch someone
work, and collaborate with someone who I’m a fan of.”
For Garcia, it is always about the material, or the
director, or the challenge. Those motivations led him to Ocean’s 11
and Ocean’s 12. “You’re working with Steven Soderbergh, a
great director. You’re working with Warner Brothers and great actors
and a great script, and everything is there. Don’t get me wrong.
There’s great value in that. It makes the journey more interesting.
But there’s no mystery in the destiny of that film,” Garcia
says.
His star-making turn as Vincent Mancini in The
Godfather: Part III garnered him his first Oscar nomination in 1991
for Best Supporting Actor. But even with the critical acclaim, Garcia is
more concerned with the moviemaking process than what happens when
it’s finished. “I haven’t seen that movie since
1992,” Garcia says. “The real memories you have are not about
the final product, but the process is the memory you take with you. I
remember the whole film, the making of the movie. It’s about the
relationships and it’s about your life. Life is what happens while
you’re making a movie.”
However, Garcia’s relationship with Godfather director
Francis Ford Coppola is more than just a memory. The experience changed
Garcia’s life, and to this day, Coppola remains a friend, a mentor
and a go-to guy for Garcia.
The relationship developed slowly. Garcia was
completing Internal Affairs when Paramount president Frank Mancuso
suggested he pursue the role of Sonny Corleone’s illegitimate son in The
Godfather: Part III. “But you know with Francis, being suggested by
the studio wasn’t exactly the best part to play,” Garcia says.
He first put his name in the hopper in May 1990, and it wasn’t until
August that he was asked to meet with Coppola.
Nearly a month went by after their meeting, and
Garcia kept asking his agent to find out why other actors such as Val
Kilmer and Alec Baldwin were being screen-tested, but he wasn’t.
Finally, he was invited to visit Coppola at the Niebaum-Coppola winery in
Napa Valley, California. He met with the legendary director, who gave
Garcia instructions and scenes to act out. That night, the power went out
at the estate and Garcia scrambled to find candles just to be able to read
his lines. Nevertheless, he felt the screen test went well, and Fred Roos,
a casting director and longtime Coppola collaborator, invited him to stay
in Napa for dinner with Coppola that night. “Fifteen minutes later,
Roos said ‘Never mind, go home to Los Angeles, and we’ll be in
touch,’ ” Garcia says, with a laugh. But at 8 the next morning, Garcia’s agent
called and said he had the part, instructing him to report for rehearsals
the following Monday morning. “He [Coppola] waited until the end to
test me, and then he gave me the part,” Garcia says.
“Francis inspires you to dream,” says
Garcia. “There’s a Robert Browning quote that
‘man’s reach should be greater than his grasp. What’s a
heaven for?’ Francis inspires you to go out and try things.
That’s why he inspired a great director in his daughter [Sofia]. He
has that effect on you.
“I see [Coppola] as the man on the mountain
you go to for advice and knowledge,” adds Garcia. “He’s
done it for me. I’ve shown him movies and he’s taken time out
to sit in a cutting room for 48 hours straight, to talk about it
philosophically, and why is that scene there, and why are you going
there.”
Garcia says that he was just beginning to think
about making The Lost City when he met Coppola. He has often said about
making The Godfather: Part III: “I went into that movie an actor and
I came out of it a filmmaker.” He credits Coppola with instilling his
desire to direct.
“That’s why I began to pursue that
aspect of my life more aggressively,” says Garcia. To date, the actor
has produced and directed documentaries, dramas and thrillers but The Lost
City will be his directorial debut. “There were some other
opportunities that I’ve had to direct feature films, but I have this
sort of loyalty to The Lost City to do it first.”
While he won’t divulge many details about the
film, Garcia does say that he was motivated to find a story in which he
could highlight the culture, music and artistry of late-’50s Havana,
prior to the revolution. In addition, he says it’s a story about
impossible love and the tragedy of exile. He’s quick to mention that
some of his Hollywood friends, such as Robert Duvall and Dustin Hoffman,
have expressed a desire to be in the film, but with the financing almost in
place, their participation will depend on their schedules. “If the
movie gods are willing, we will be filming The Lost City this
summer,” says Garcia.
It will be another stage in a career that began
shortly after he entered Miami-Dade Community College South Campus in 1974.
Garcia had acted in community theater as a child, but “I wasn’t
all that adept at it,” he says. He focused on athletics: baseball and
then basketball. But he caught mononucleosis and had to sit out from sports
for nearly a year. “My freshman year in college, I took an acting
class and it refueled my interest in it,” he says. He continued to
study acting, first at Florida International University and then in Los
Angeles.
His first break was a small but pivotal part in The
Mean Season. “That was the role that took me away from waiting tables
and doing things other than acting,” Garcia says. He then scored a
role as a villainous kingpin opposite Jeff Bridges’s alcoholic ex-cop
in Hal Ashby’s 1986 film 8 Million Ways to Die, which he says got him
noticed in the film industry. After seeing him in that film, veteran
director Brian De Palma cast Garcia in The Untouchables, which was the
final piece of the puzzle. “That film showed the industry that I
could be a marketable commodity,” he says, “and that opened up
a lot of choices for me as an actor.”
Independent cinema, however, has been the lifeblood
of Garcia’s more than 20-year career. He enjoys donning a
producer’s cap for many of the independent films he makes and he
finds it fulfilling to collaborate with directors.
“I want the movie to exist and then see what
happens,” Garcia says. “Real success, as William Saroyan says,
is that it exists. The real success is that you’ve been able to
create the film.”
As he talks about his personal projects,
Garcia’s speech picks up speed. His voice becomes charged and he
stares intently across the table. “I’m not trying to be in the
Forbes 500. I’ve made a comfortable living. I’m financially
secure. I don’t need to go to work for cash…sometimes the
movies that you are the most proud of are the least commercial of the films
you do.”
There’s another element, too, even more
personal perhaps. His devotion to the independent film world, and his
desire to do more directing and producing, has meant that he can control
his commitments and limit the time away from his family. “I can fit
it around my schedule…you’re more on your own time.”
It’s not just lip service to hear Garcia talk
about how his life revolves around his family. He’s been married to
Marivi Lorido Garcia since 1982. The couple has three daughters, Dominik,
Daniella and Alessandra, and a little boy, Andrés, who turned two in
January. Only twice in the last 20 years has he been away from them for
longer than five days. Once was for Black Rain, when Maria was pregnant
with their second daughter and he spent four weeks in Japan filming the
thriller with Michael Douglas; the other time was last summer, when he shot
a film about Italian painter and sculptor Amedeo Modigliani in Romania. The
family had actually planned to join him there after Alessandra’s
elementary school graduation, but his eldest daughter caught mononucleosis.
By then, Garcia had shot one week of the film, returned to the United
States for the graduation, and realized that Romania wasn’t going to
be a great place for the family.
“Generally, we all go or I pass,”
Garcia says. “Certain movies deserve packing everybody up and going,
and other movies it’s just not worth it. Life is what happens while
you’re making movies, and the life is your children.”
His personal projects also reflect an abiding bond
with the land of his birth. He was born Andrés Arturo García
Meñendez in Havana, Cuba, on April 12, 1956, and fled with his
family to Miami in 1961 with not much more than the clothes on their backs.
“We had to borrow a dime when we got there to make a phone call at
the airport to call a relative living in Miami,” Garcia says. That
link to Cuba has involved Garcia in one of his most passionate pursuits,
Cuban music, and led to his collaboration with the world-famous Cuban bass
player Cachao. Garcia has filmed two documentaries about and released
several CDs with the musician, who is 85. One recording won a Grammy award
in 1994 and a second was nominated for a Grammy in 1995. Garcia recently
finished the second film about the making of a new Cachao CD, which was
composed and recorded in 36 hours—three days of 12-hour sessions.
Garcia even played conga drums on some of the tracks. The film is scheduled
to be released in April.
Those Cuba-related projects are Garcia’s way
of keeping the memory of Cuba alive. “I’m a Cuban, or more
specifically, I’m Cuban American, and I’m proud of it. I have
the benefit of two great cultures and I love both of them,” Garcia
says. But that reality of his dual roots doesn’t diminish his
feelings toward Cuba. “The tragedy of exile is exile. We didn’t
come as immigrants. We came as political exiles. You are always at a loss
for the one thing you most cherish, the country you were born
in.”
Cuba’s political system and particularly
Fidel Castro receive nothing but scorn from Garcia. Although not a radical
activist in the Cuban-American community, Garcia nevertheless holds very
sharply defined beliefs about the Cuban leader. “The great hypocrisy
of the Cuban regime is that the Cuban revolution has never fulfilled its
promise. The Cuban revolution was not a Marxist-Leninist revolution. It was
motivated and financed by the middle and upper class, the intellectuals,
the people who were embarrassed by the lack of pluralism in the [Fulgencio]
Batista regime, his corrupt government and his abolishing to a great degree
of the Cuban constitution,” Garcia says.
He argues that Castro betrayed the 26 July
Movement’s basic principles, including the restoration of the
constitution, democracy, elections and the understanding that its members
would not seek political office. He says that within a year Castro had
imposed his personal agenda on the revolution, and then quickly
consolidated power by eliminating or imprisoning his rivals.
“There’s been a huge betrayal of humanity there. There have
been a lot of atrocities against human beings and human rights in Cuba for
40 years,” Garcia says.
Garcia also echoes one of the themes of
America’s Cuban exile population, that the embargo against Castro
should not be lifted until Castro is held accountable for his human rights
record. “There are two embargoes that need to be lifted. Yes,
America’s embargo on Cuba, but Castro needs to lift the embargo of
human rights for the Cuban people,” Garcia says. He acknowledges that
hard-liners exist in the exile community who emphatically state that they
will never make a deal with the devil. “But who stops it?
Fidel…he’s the first one who doesn’t want the embargo
lifted, because for now he still has his enemy and he can blame the United
States for all his troubles.”
Technically, Garcia has never set foot on Cuban
soil since he left in 1961, but he did visit the U.S. naval base at
Guantánamo Bay in 1995 to take part in a concert with fellow
Cuban-American Gloria Estefan for 16,000 refugees who had fled Cuba but
failed to reach the U.S. mainland. “Oh, I was definitely in Cuba. The
only word I can find is it was ethereal. You could hear the wind
blow,” Garcia says. His voice fades away as he struggles for a more
detailed description of what it was like to be there.
“To me it’s all a great tragedy. It is
a very sad thing. All you can hope is that someday it will change. I think
there are people there who want it to change, but in order to survive in
that society, you have to have two faces,” Garcia says. “Why
were we dealt this black card of destiny? The island doesn’t deserve
it. The people don’t deserve [it]. But unfortunately, we are in a bit
of a standstill…there’s nothing that will happen until he
[Castro] dies.”
Besides Garcia’s love of Cuba and its music, he
also enjoys smoking premium cigars on special occasions. “My
grandfather smoked cigars until he died and my father smoked cigars and
cigarettes when he was younger. It was just part of Cuban culture,”
Garcia says. “I try to be moderate about it because I really
don’t want a chain cigar habit.”
His favorite smokes include Cuban Montecristos and
the Dominican Fuente Fuente OpusX. “I’ve had the Montecristo
No. 5 leadoff, followed by No. 4 batting second, the No. 2 bats third, and
then in the cleanup spot, I have the OpusX,” Garcia says.
“I smoke because of the camaraderie of it.
It’s a cultural thing ultimately, and it taps into your
subconscious,” Garcia says, as he puffs on an A. Fuente Don Carlos.
“There’s a certain companionship because it’s part of the
culture I grew up in. It’s about sharing more than anything
else.”
Another pastime is golf, which Garcia became obsessed
with when he rediscovered the game in 1985. But he found that he
didn’t have enough time to play to earn a single-digit handicap.
“I have a 10 handicap now, which isn’t bad for a weekend
golfer,” Garcia says. “But I have to start playing here because
I’m going to the AT&T Pebble Beach in a few weeks.”
He’s been paired with Paul Stankowski for the last four years, ever
since they won the pro-am part of the tournament the first year they played
together. “We haven’t made the cut since,” he says.
The actor first picked up a club when he was young
and living in Miami Beach. “It was during the time of Arnie’s
Army, and some of the kids bought clubs, so we all bought clubs,”
says Garcia. “We used to sneak out before the course opened in the
morning to save the $1.50 greens fee,” he adds with a laugh.
He’s laughing because the clandestine rounds tell
all anyone needs to know about the reality of his childhood in Miami. He
remembers that all his friends had odd jobs, scrambling to make pennies.
His older brother, Rene, worked for Murf the Surf, a legendary Miami Beach
figure, who, according to Garcia, ran the pools at several of the old Art
Deco hotels along 71st Street and Collins Avenue. “My brother used to
go there before school, lay out the mattresses for the tourists, go to
school, come back in the afternoon and pick up the mattresses,”
Garcia says. “He used me to pick up cigarette butts with those
dustpans on a handle, and for that he used to let me swim in the
pool.”
Many of the former well-to-do, educated Cuban exiles
came to America and ended up working low-paying jobs as busboys or parking
lot attendants to help feed and clothe their families, according to Garcia.
“It was the spirit of the exile,” Garcia says. His father,
Rene, who had been a farmer and a lawyer in Cuba, first worked at a
catering business that fed laborers coming home in the evening
“because no one had time to cook for themselves,” Garcia says.
“And we ate well, too, as a result.” The elder Garcia soon
began selling sneakers on consignment and later acquired the
distributorship for a sock business that produced a very particular style
of almost transparent sock popular in the Cuban community. After selling
socks for a while with his father, Andy’s brother started a fragrance
business that turned into a multimillion-dollar enterprise, and eventually,
both Andy’s father and mother joined the company. Although the
original fragrance business was sold, the younger Garcia has started
another company in the same industry.
“My father instilled in us a work
ethic,” Garcia says. “Everybody in our household had to
work.” He recalls leaving high school basketball practice and riding
a bus from Miami Beach to Southwest 8th Street where his dad had a small
warehouse. Garcia swept the floors before returning home with his father to
Miami Beach, usually after 8 p.m. Garcia’s sister, Tessi, is a successful
interior designer in south Florida, and Garcia attributes her success to
that same family work ethic. “It’s inherent in the Cuban
culture, but it’s also inherent in the exile or the immigrant
experience. You have the opportunity to move forward, but there’s
also the absolute necessity that you have to. You have to provide for your
family. When things got tough, we all always had that example of our
parents before us.”
Recalling his early years in Florida, the actor
says, “That’s why it was a big deal to save the $1.50 greens
fee. We didn’t have much. We had to avoid the sprinklers, so
you’d wait until the spray had passed by your ball and then
you’d run in, hit your ball and get out. To this day, I don’t
spend a lot of time over the ball.”
The teenage fascination with golf faded quickly,
but while on the set of The Mean Season in 1985, one of Garcia’s
costars, Richard Bradford, said he was going to play golf after shooting
was done for the day. Garcia recalls saying “Hey, I used to play
golf” and tagging along. He was hooked again immediately.
“I still play once a week, and before Pebble
Beach, I’ll try to play for four or five days in a row to get some
tempo,” Garcia says. “But it’s a beautiful, extraordinary
game, and a game you can play by yourself. A lot of times I go out alone,
and it’s like a walk with a smoke…to me, it’s more about
the experience of moving the ball forward.”
Garcia’s description of how he approaches
golf could be applied to the way he approaches life. Going out alone.
Taking pleasure in the process. Moving forward. Not worrying about the
results so much. That philosophy reflects why so many of his career choices
have been independent films in which he has a personal stake, and not so
much the surefire big-budget studio productions.
Take his answer to the question about his favorite
role. He pauses for a minute and says, “I’d have to say
it’s Modigliani,” a film that has been finished but to date has
no distributor nor release date. “It’s an interesting
experience because of the nature of the film, the independence of the film,
financed totally outside the studio system by one person with no
distributor, with no involvement by anyone,” Garcia says.
He admits that before Modigliani, his answer would
have been Vincent Mancini in The Godfather: Part III.
“When the director [of Modigliani], Mick Davis,
first came to me and said, ‘I’m doing this movie and this
script about Modigliani,’ I said, ‘I know what kind of life he
led. If the script needs work, we’ll work on it,’” says Garcia.
“Because of the spirit of Modigliani, who was a free spirit, there
was a certain liberty or freedom that I always try to bring to my work.
Some parts empower that freedom.
“You are defined by who are, by your choices
in life, in all regards, not just in doing movies. What you do. How you
conduct yourself. What moral decisions you make. The small decisions in
life define you. Who I am as an actor is no mystery. You can interpret or
misinterpret it, but it’s all there. I have no regrets of any movie
I’ve ever done because the creative process is why I do it, to have
relationships with the people who are in the movie.
“You just have to go with it. You have to take
that kind of risk. I’m not afraid of risk or failure at all. There is
no failure for me,” Garcia says. “Sure, the end result will
hopefully live up to your dream of what it could be. But if you don’t
attempt something, then you get back to that quote about not reaching. You
just can’t have all the knots and loose ends ironed out. Life is not
that way. You have to put it out there.
“You have to step on the precipice.” Return to the People page
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