Kiss Of The Spider Woman’s Tonatiuh Is “Happy” To Give Underrepresented Communities The Hollywood Treatment
“I felt like I was living my dream,” said Tonatiuh about leading the big screen adaptation of Kiss Of The Spider Woman. He plays Molina, a gay window dresser, who finds himself sharing a cell with political prisoner Valentín (Diego Luna). The duo form an unlikely bond as Molina tells the story of his favorite Hollywood musical led by the glamorous actress Ingrid Luna (Jennifer Lopez). It’s a role with big shoes to fill as William Hurt won the Oscar for Best Actor in the 1985 film. Tonatiuh sat down with Pop Culture Planet’s Kristen Maldonado to break down the layers behind Kiss Of The Spider Woman.
The team essentially filmed two movies in one as they explore Molina’s reality and his musical fantasy. “It was the Olympics of acting. I lost 45 pounds for the gig. I got to tell two different characters, but three different expressions of gender, which was really great,” he told me. “I got to go backwards in time and live a Gene Kelly, Montgomery Cliff, Errol Flynn fantasy. Then we go into the prison cell and live that dark reality and tell essentially a two-handed play with Diego Luna, which was a gift.”
The Spider Woman and Aurora being played by the same person almost makes her feel like a mirror to Molina's life. She's beauty, danger, desire, death, and even who he really wants to be. “Molina is the Spider Woman. Like she is his shadow and light. She is the ideal version of himself and the thing that he feels he would never obtain. It's just fascinating because I also think Molina utilizes that narrative as a way of confessing his truth towards the end. He doesn't know how to say I love you because he's never thought that love was possible,” said Tonatiuh about making sense of the connection between what Molina loves and what he's afraid of. “Through Aurora, he's able to say, ‘Well, Aurora loves Armando, but she has to hide it in order to keep him alive.’ I find that often times so many of us live in this tender world, but it's so scary to be vulnerable. But the message of the film, I think, is vulnerability is the price we pay in order to fall in love and to connect.”
His final musical number in the movie is breathtaking, but he admitted filming went by fast. “Man, I had all this preparation in my head. I swear to God. I literally had all these Broadway dancers that I've been training with. I wanted to have a little pow-wow and a circle moment and tell them how grateful I was. Everything was so quick that day,” he laughed. “It looks like a grandiose film, which it is. It's very beautiful, but it was an independent budget. We had to move and there was no margin of errors. It was one of those moments where it was just like, ‘Savor it as much as you can,’ but all of a sudden 12 hours went by and it was like, ‘Okay, we're off to the next.’”
Kiss of the Spider Woman explores queerness, gender fluidity, and Latin identity in such a powerful way. “It really makes me happy to give those communities the absolute Hollywood treatment because that is what those communities deserve. We deserve joy, we deserve peace, we deserve beauty,” said Tonatiuh about what it means to bring that message to today’s audiences. “I think in a time where both of them are being under attack, it's a nice remembrance to keep your head up and remind you of the value and the worth that we have.”
Catch Kiss Of The Spider Woman in theaters on October 10.
