For Luis Gerardo Méndez, part of what drew him to Skincare, where he acts opposite Elizabeth Banks as Angel Vergara, the owner of a beauty parlor that opens up right in front of the one owned by Banks’ Hope Goldman, was the idea of getting the “right kind of representation.” Méndez spoke to Remezcla about the movie, getting to work with Banks and his character, Angel Vergara, and shared that there’s still a sense that “representation is having a Latino actor or an Asian actor in your movie, and it’s not about that, it’s about the right representation.”
That, for Méndez, was “the reason I did Skincare, because it was like, oh, he’s not just working in the salon, cleaning the salon, he owns the salon, and he has technology from NASA.” And then there’s the fact that “the movie is loosely inspired by true events, so this somehow happened, so I think it’s, those are the kind of roles that I’m always looking for, roles that show us in a different way. I like that.”
His character, Angel Vergara, is meant to be the type of character you aren’t sure about the entire movie, which Méndez confessed was “very tricky,” because it requires you to “adjust every single gesture to make the audience think this or that.” But ultimately, Méndez approached the character as a “good guy.”
“At the end of the day, Angel is just a good Latino guy who’s trying to do a good job, but this white woman sees him and she’s like, this guy wants to destroy me, this guy wants to kill me. Which is, I think, a very interesting take on how the U.S. works sometimes with Latinos.”
Méndez, who just directed his first movie for Netflix, Technoboys, shared that he got to ask Elizabeth Banks, who is also a producer and a director, for advice between takes. “Directing is something that I really wanted to do, and it was actually pretty special because when we were shooting Skincare, I was asking her so many questions, because my movie is kind of musical in a way, and she did Pitch Perfect, so I asked like, how do you shoot this, how do you do that, how do you do the camera and the microphone and the lip-sync and blah, blah, blah.”
In Technoboys, Méndez plays the lead Alan, the leader of the ’90s boyband Technoboys. Two decades after failing to stop the wedding of his eternal crush, Melena, he and his new manager George are on a mission to reunite the Technoboys: Babyface, Fer, Leo and Charly. It’s set to debut on September 11th on Netflix.
“That was my dream,” Méndez, who shot to fame with his starring role in the 2013 comedy The Noble Family and later co-starred in Club de Cuervos, Netflix’s first-ever original production in Spanish, added. “My dream never was, oh, I want to be in a Hollywood movie, my dream was I want to be a part of that industry, I want to understand how they do these things with more budget, with bigger toys.”
“And suddenly, I’m sharing a set with Elizabeth Banks, and she’s giving me advice on how to direct my movie, so it’s something that I dreamed of, but I never knew it was going to happen this way, and I’m super grateful and excited, and it’s absolutely surreal still.”
Skincare is in theaters now.
