Joaquim d’Almeida – Mr Bad Guy
He cries when he watches cartoons, enjoys Italian comedy films and would like to have been an opera singer. These are just some of the interesting snippets of a conversation with a man who has been working in the Hollywood film industry for thirty years: Joaquim D’Almeida.
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He arrives in a convertible, gets out of the car and says hello to everyone. These people are used to seeing this Portuguese star of Hollywood who, when he’s in Portugal, rarely misses lunch in a restaurant with his friends in São Pedro de Sintra, close to the farm where he lives. This is where we meet. During our conversation, Joaquim, now 53, talks about his vegetable patch and garden and how they remind of when he was eighteen and a gardener at the Zaire Embassy in Austria. His girlfriend was the ambassador’s secretary and the Embassy cleaner married the Portuguese composer António Victorino D’Almeida. It all sounds like a film…
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All the world’s indeed a stage
He left his family home near Sintra for New York in the seventies: it was a city of vice and unusual characters, which Joaquim D’Almeida soaked up when he arrived in 1977. He signed up at the Lee Strasberg Theatre and Film Institute; paying for his tuition with a job in a bar he eventually came to manage: La Gamelle. It was frequented by all the mafia types in New York before the Rudolph Giuliani era, when the Italian mafia still controlled the city. Joaquim D’Almeida was their favourite waiter when they had important secret sit-downs. “I was their clown!”, he jokes; “I used to dance, sing, serve the drinks…”. It was a kind of anthropological (almost ethnographic) study that would later help him play various bad guy roles in films. “They were really pleased when I started doing films. And they thought it funny seeing me play roles that they were living!”, he recalls. It was that dangerous New York that I liked.
Freedom for all
He saw episodes in the lives of magnates in hotels – like the Carlyle, on the Upper East Side, where, one night, he preferred gazing at the Picasso and Modigliani paintings in the apartment, instead of paying his girlfriend any attention. He used to fill the policemen’s orange juice bottles with alcohol; the loft where he lived was an old Romanof caviar factory. It was his experiences on the East Side that taught him to speak five languages fluently (Spanish, Italian, English, French and German). He saw the opening of the mythical club Studio 54, the place where America discovered freedom, after the previous decade that was marked by protests against the war in Vietnam, with the phenomenon of Woodstock coursing through American veins and younger generations seriously needing to relax, feel and live. Joaquim D’Almeida was there, in the game, after the 1974 revolution in Portugal had interrupted his studies at the Conservatório Nacional, in Lisbon. It was here that he dreamt of becoming a lyrical singer – he still dreams; but his voice becomes slightly comic and funny when he sings a little Verdi with tenderness and theatricality; “opera is always larger than life”, he remarks. He has done voices for cartoons dubbed into Portuguese and confesses to having cried while watching them.
Talent and youth
When he signed up at the Lee Strasberg Institute, Joaquim D’Almeida thought he was going to be a comedy actor. He has always been an admirer of Italian comedy and, particularly, the actors Marcelo Mastroianni (who he worked with in Sostiene Pereira, a 1996 film based on Antonio Tabucchi’s book of the same name).
Desperado and Blade Runner are the two films that labelled him as the bad guy in films and he has appeared in over seventy films since then. But it was his first feature film, Good Morning, Babylon (1987), by the brothers Paolo and Vittorio Taviani, that allowed him to give up his day job in the bar. The directors liked Joaquim’s Roman accent when he spoke Italian; something he picked up from his friend Otelo, who he shared an apartment with in New York – “they said I had an old-style look”, they liked his conversation and profile. His international career had begun – the film opened the 1988 Cannes Film Festival – and he did three more films that year.
Hollywood Glamour
His bad guy roles have been a mainstay since Desperado (1995), Robert Rodriguez’s film with António Banderas and Salma Hayek. Joaquim plays Bucho, the older brother of El Mariachi, who wants to destroy his drug business in a small Mexican town. It’s an action film with comic moments and lots of special effects.
“I don’t like Hollywood and all that nonsense”, says Joaquim D’Almeida, who lives among the stars by the beach in Santa Monica and twenty minutes drive from Hollywood. “It’s one thing making a film and getting an award for what we do. It’s quite another to buy into that pretence, where they all go to the gym but have drug problems; then one gets drunk and insults his wife… Nobody smokes, but everybody smokes, it seems…” It’s hypocrisy he doesn’t want to be part of. He mentions certain exceptions, like Kieffer Sutherland, who he acted with in the series 24: “He admits he drinks half a bottle of whiskey a day and smokes when he feels like it. He doesn’t have that façade, despite always having an assistant by his side telling him not to smoke because there are photographers around…” Joaquim D’Almeida has a group of friends he meets up with once in a while: “They’ve got nothing to do with cinema. Just talking about cinema bugs me. Robert Rodriguez is a right bore. He’s a kid. He only eats hamburgers and talks about films! There are other things in life. I know that I’ve missed out on a lot of films because I don’t have the patience for it”. Hollywood “families” don’t interest him either: “Martin Sheen, Charlie Sheen, Emílio Estevez… it all fits together and they end up marrying each other… And António Banderas – I like him a lot, he’s a really nice guy – he arrived there [Hollywood] from the Almodóvar school. He took off his shirt and became the Latin sex symbol. He married a girl from the Hollywood ‘royal families’…”. Not everyone is the same, “some guys show up, and ask themselves how someone Portuguese ended up there”. There aren’t many in North American cinema.
Between sea and mountains
Joaquim D’Almeida has a very clear idea of what he wants and doesn’t want as an actor; which is why he rarely does TV series. Being a father is an important factor: he has a 16-year-old son and a daughter of 7. He prefers to take jobs that allow him to spend more time in Portugal with his children and he doesn’t commit himself to TV series with seven-year contracts; only this year he turned down the chance to play a surgeon in an American series. When he’s living in the USA, Joaquim D’Almeida’s landscape is the sea. When he’s in Portugal, it’s the farm he has near Sintra. He used to live in the centre of the city, but the neighbourhood life of the Castelo and Lapa quarters of Lisbon made him ill at ease. He decided to live in an area where he father had his pharmaceutical laboratories. Having just one definitive address is very difficult. He likes the advantages and power of the American film industry and he couldn’t adapt to just living in Portugal. The main reason is that he doesn’t do many films here – and the pettiness and envy that are an everyday part of Portuguese cinema makes him want to keep his distance. “I think I have the best of both worlds. I like the two. I’m Portuguese-American. And the Portuguese part is considerably bigger than the American”.
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By Cláudia Almeida
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