Guitarricadelafuente’s wildest dreams might include facing off with Taylor Swift. He’s already gotten close. Two nights before sitting down with Gold Derby, the Spanish singer-songwriter and his La Bola Negra castmates were at the Academy Museum Gala, where Swift performed.
“We were experiencing her firsthand, vibing to her songs, to ‘Love Story,’” he says. “We were feeling like teenagers.”
Come Oscar season, he could be competing against her. Guitarricadelafuente wrote “La Nieve” (“The Snow”), an original song for La Bola Negra that has been submitted for Best Original Song consideration. Swift is in the race with “I Knew It, I Knew You” from Toy Story 5.
“That would be so crazy and out of this world,” he says of a possible showdown. “To be able to go with ‘La Nieve’ to a stage like that, portraying this film and the message of it, would be something pretty amazing.”
It caps a whirlwind year for the musician, who makes his acting debut in the film. “It’s not just my first role as an actor, but also I’ve been able to put much more than the lyrics and the voice behind it — to embody the character that lives inside of this song,” he says. “It’s as if both worlds collided.”
La Bola Negra, which won Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi (known as Los Javis) Best Director at Cannes, is Spain’s official submission for Best International Feature. It follows three gay men across 1932, 1937, and 2017. In the 1937 storyline, Guitarricadelafuente plays Sebastián, a young trumpet player forced into Franco’s Nationalist army after his village is bombed. Sebastián falls for Rafael (Miguel Bernardeau), the Republican prisoner he’s assigned to guard, who is based on Federico García Lorca’s real-life love, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún.
‘Everything around them is burning’
Playing Rafael meant stepping into one of the darkest chapters of Spanish history. “To place somebody who’s seeing their own country burn, and to see how fascism is winning and how war eliminates everything from life and only leaves death — it’s pretty hard and very revealing for a young generation like me,” Bernardeau says. “It was a moment where time stopped and everything got eliminated. It was harsh, but that’s why we do what we do. I had a great colleague to play opposite. So I had fun, but it was intense.”
The hardest part, Guitarricadelafuente says, was building a romance that couldn’t be seen. “We started from a very difficult place, which was to not be caught,” he says. “There was a lot of nonverbal communication, and the development of our relationship had to happen in a very subtle way while everything around them is burning, with the hostility of war and this aggressive, virile masculinity. To try and capture that impossibility and that desire without anybody noticing was pretty complex.”
Penélope Cruz: ‘A gift fallen from heaven’
In 1937, Sebastián crosses paths with Nené (Penélope Cruz), a cabaret singer performing for the Nationalist troops. When Cruz shot her big entrance, the 200 extras playing soldiers had no idea she was coming.
“They believed it was a cuplé [a risqué Spanish theatrical song genre] artist who was going to sing. And as soon as she came out, everybody was like, ‘OK, wait a minute. Is that Penélope Cruz?’” Guitarricadelafuente says. “You would see these 200 guys actually seeing Penélope as if the soldiers were seeing Nené Romero for the first time. They were overexcited, and the whole set would go bonkers. It was amazing to watch her work. It’s someone you’ve admired ever since you were growing up, and to see her act on set was something out of this world.”
He also got to share one of her most intimate scenes, when Nené recognizes something in Sebastián “before he can identify himself.” “She was so generous,” he says. “For me, the first time that I was acting, I felt so embraced by her and so protected by her. It was a gift fallen from heaven.”
Bernardeau wasn’t as lucky. Rafael never crosses paths with Nené or with Glenn Close’s character, Isabelle. “That was the worst part of this movie,” he says, “not working with her.”
He still came away with plenty. “I’m very obsessive as an actor, but I had never felt the freedom to act like this — to have a script that allows me to access those places, and directors that give me the freedom and the trust to do it,” he says. “That’s what I take.”
La Bola Negra is now playing in select theaters and streams on Netflix starting Dec. 2.
