Guitarricadelafuente may be used to arena concert tours, performing his music for tens of thousands of screaming fans a night, but he’s gleaning that no experience can prepare you for the pace of an Oscar campaign. “Everything is so crazy,” he says from a patio in Middleburg, Virginia, his latest stop on the already dizzying press tour for La Bola Negra. His signature curls blow calmly in the breeze as he smiles and laughs to himself, stuck in a state of some kind of disbelief (or, perhaps, jet lag). “Ever since I said yes to joining this adventure, I wasn’t expecting anything to happen at all,” he says. “I just thought, ‘Well, this, this was my first role ever.’”
Indeed, screen debuts don’t tend to go this way. Yet the 29-year-old Spanish native (born Álvaro Lafuente Calvo, with his stage name combining his surname with a Spanish diminutive that means “small guitar”), who’s emerged as a very popular folk artist over the past few years in his home country, is learning how things go when that first movie manages to strike a real chord.
An epic gay drama spanning nearly a century, La Bola Negra premiered to an ecstatic response at the Cannes Film Festival, where the filmmakers Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi — known colloquially as “Los Javis” — won the best-director prize. Netflix picked up North American rights, setting a major awards push in motion; the movie has since won the coveted Audience Award at the Toronto International Film Festival and opened stateside to the second-highest per-screen theatrical average of any non-English language movie, ever — a nice start, given that it’s Netflix’s guinea pig for reporting box-office grosses. (The film will expand over the next month-plus before streaming Dec. 2.)
Guitarricadelafuente portrays Sebastián, the focus of the film’s central timeline set during the Spanish Civil War. A village trumpeter visiting a small town, he’s forced to defect to the Nationalist side after narrowly surviving a brutal attack on the community. He’s assigned to guard Rafael Rodríguez Rapún (Miguel Bernardeau), a Republican prisoner of war — and in getting to know him, finds his repressed sexual identity awakened.
Their story is drawn from Alberto Conejero’s play La Piedra Oscura, which in turn was inspired by Federico García Lorca’s unfinished work, La Bola Negra — which is itself also dramatized as part of Los Javis’ imaginative tapestry. Sebastián anchors the film’s sweeping examination of Spanish history, sexual shame and cultural trauma — with Guitarricadelafuente movingly tracing one very lost young man’s fight for survival and his pained journey toward some kind of personal freedom. It’s a striking first impression in front of the camera, bolstered by his mournful original song “La Nieve,” which ties La Bola Negra’s strands together in a wrenching climactic sequence.
The work got personal: From his and Sebastián’s eerily parallel connections to the Spanish Civil War to his own identity as an out gay man, Guitarricadelafuente found plenty in La Bola Negra that resonated. In a wide-ranging conversation, he reveals he’s still finding new layers to it all.
How did you find the shift into acting, having been a popular musician for a number of years? Is it something you’d wanted to do?
I wanted to be an actor before I wanted to be a singer. Music was such a big part of my life, but I didn’t see it as something professional. When I started, like eight years ago, to go on tour and sing in front of an audience, I used to be very shy — my [stage name] was a way of having people not knowing who I was. If you saw me like eight years ago, I would defend myself with a guitar — it was kind of a shield, but also like a gun. (Laughs.) But music in a way taught me how to feel kind of comfortable with myself. With time, music allowed me to be able to go on stage. You adopt an aspirational ego that you would like to live in your real life. So I think there’s that very big link between performing in a film and being in a concert.
How did you react to the actual demands of the role?
Many, many things seemed frightening. Obviously it’s the first time I’m doing this, but all of the topics that were around it: the Spanish Civil War, Federico García Lorca, telling like a big queer story on this scale that I hadn’t seen before. At least in Spain, these are topics that are very scary to do because they’ve been done many times, but with a different kind of generational approach. When I read the script, it was like, okay, this is not just resonating with the way that I perceive these [ideas], but it’s also about self-discovery — a young, gay man finding his place in the world. Sebastián is somebody that doesn’t have the chance to even allow himself to discover who he is or find his place in the world.
Did you have any touchstones along those lines, growing up queer yourself?
The closest would be the Almodóvar movies. So many queer stories, stories about women, very liberating stories at a time where it wasn’t normal to talk about that. Those were the first things that I could see on the big screen. Growing up, you didn’t get that much in terms of references.
When I saw this movie when it was released in Spain, I went with my friends because I wanted to see their reaction. You’ve seen on TikTok and all around, many, many screenings where the film ends and there’s this big silence in the room. I saw a 16-year-old gay couple holding hands and hugging each other and crying. I remembered myself when I was 16; that wasn’t even something to consider doing, you know, [in public]. That was very, very touching to see.
The film is a massive hit in Spain — it’s rare to find a big, gay blockbuster, anywhere.
This movie is bringing people back to the cinema that haven’t been in 10 years. It is a cultural thing. It is not just a queer story; it’s a story about love and having empathy for all of those stories that haven’t been able to be told. And it’s been more impressive to see the older generations. You can think that they’ll have more prejudices, or have been more silent about these topics. So it feels like many worlds holding hands together and having a moment of reconciliation in a way. Like, everybody’s going to see La Bola Negra in Spain, no matter where you come from.
Why do you think that is? It’s a pretty unprecedented success for a gay movie in Spain especially, and like you said, it feels like a real cultural moment.
I think it’s many things. When you get to the core of something that seemed very local and like a story of a country — of a civil war — you can then make something really big. This film has achieved that. You see three stories intertwining in time — when I read the script, I couldn’t imagine how it could come to an end, visually and narratively. There’s a cathartic thing when you finish the movie. It’s what films should be used for, not to lecture, but to excite you about something. It encourages you to make a decision in your life, to embrace the love that you have.
What was the hardest scene to film?
The most difficult one would be the one of the last ones — the execution. It was a very intense scene to shoot, because it was the culmination of all of this emotion and baggage, with this perfect storm happening. We were under that storm for three hours. We were holding these 1930s war guns that didn’t work. We had to repeat it many times — and had to stay in that toughness and that hostility and that repression that the character is putting himself through. You’re being told to kill someone. You’re gonna carry that for the rest of your life. It was very tough to live in.
Your performance really embodies the ambivalence of a soldier in a conflict like this, and yet it’s also filled with emotion. Especially thinking of a scene like that, how did you calibrate that?
All of these people that were forced to go to war, there are many young men that didn’t even know what they were fighting for or why they had blood on their hands. There’s this big charge of innocence, but many people question them about that innocence — they say “you could have fought back,” but they would’ve killed you otherwise. That charge of responsibility is something that the character has to live with for the rest of his life. It makes you think about all of those people that had to fight that in real life.
My grandfather had to live a similar thing to what Sebastián lived: He was from a small town in the north of Spain, and he was born in 1914. He went to war at like 18 years old, and the village he was from was occupied by the Nationalist Franco side. He was forced to go to fight for them. The Spanish Civil War was something that touched every single one of us. We all have a link to somebody that fought there. One of my grandfathers was in the seminary and he was killed by the Republicans. So no one gets out of it. I had to feel this very, very, very closely.
That’s a lot to carry, given how close that is to what you’re playing.
Oh yeah. (Laughs.)
And you wrote the song “La Nieve” the day after shooting that, right?
That’s true. Not a coincidence! When that scene happened, I went back to the hotel room. It was like one in the morning. It was my way of processing it, that baggage. I had this piano and made this quick little melody and sent that straight to Los Javis. When they told me to do the song, I was like, it makes no sense that I’m singing over the movie while my character is appearing on screen. I thought it would be at the credits or something like that. They used the song to intertwine the three stories. If you read Lorca’s poetry, there’s a lot of reference to white…and it was very ironic to see how la nieve also represented death. When the three characters start to see that that death, or that end of a journey is happening, there’s a catalyst in them that makes them start to live their lives freely.
You worked very closely with Penélope Cruz, who plays a one-scene role in which she sees and accepts Sebastián for who he is. What was that experience like?
It was a dream. She’s like the biggest icon in Spain — the queen of Spain — and to get the chance to share this special scene with her is something that I will look back on in 10, 20 years time as a gift. There was a parallel with the way that Sebastián meets her and with real life, because there’s always this admiration thing for a diva. That’s what happened with me.
She’s very perfectionist. She would want to repeat a take every time; she wants to get things right. I felt very overwhelmed being in that situation. She made the situation much more comfortable for me, as a newcomer, and so I could be there in the most honest way possible. Even now, as we are touring with the movie, she cares about all of us. She encouraged me a lot and she cares about me a lot. I remember when we were waiting to shoot this scene in her [character’s] changing room, she was on top of the stairs, like, asking me to sing a song of mine. She was like, “A capella!” I was like, “This is not happening. This cannot be possible, right?”
She will be supportive of those that have fewer opportunities. She’s always defending those that cannot defend themselves, and I think that just represents her soul, you know? She hates that everybody refers to her as “mother” — it’s like, “Stop calling me mother. I’m your sister at least.” (Laughs.) So she’s been like my twin sister. Or my younger sister. Better.
Thinking of all the people you worked with here, all the ways in which you had to work — action scenes, intimate scenes, etc — I imagine you learn a lot about how you like to work as an actor. What did you discover about yourself on the other side?
We would have the script, but then Los Javis would say, “Okay, how would you say this? What would be the genuine way to say this for you, as Sebastián?” They would give you the freedom to do that. That blind faith in me is something that I feel so grateful for. That really encouraged me as an actor. We were so close to each other that there was a symbiotic feeling in the room. I could relate very quickly to what Ambrossi or Calvo were saying.
It was a very ambitious movie. Everybody had faith in this story and could relate to it. And that’s one of the things that made this movie feel so big. I just discovered who I am as an actor and that’s something that I want to keep on discovering. I need to be malleable, artistically — to keep soaking in life and adapting to what I see around me. To turn into someone else. I’ve learned so much doing this role, to connect with different sides of myself that I didn’t know before.
Going back to your own memory of being 16 and queer — I’m curious what kind of reflection came out of making this movie, in terms of your own identity and its place in your work.
You know, I really didn’t come out in an official way, ever. I didn’t tell my parents officially until I was maybe like 22 or something like that. I grew up in a small town where there weren’t many kinds of references or people around me at school that would be openly gay. There’s something in me that has kind of forgotten about that period. I don’t remember how it felt. Sebastián is someone that has to repress himself and hold onto something that can be very dangerous for him. When you are living during wartime, if you are focused on something else that is not surviving or helping your family to survive, that can be treated like a privileged position. He needs to live behind this masculine toughness and to be vigorous in wartime — to have a rifle in his hand, to suddenly man up without even being able to know what that means.
Right before La Bola Negra, I was working on my album Spanish Leather, and there’s a lot in that about reconciling yourself with those hostile masculine figures from your childhood that seemed against you. There was a big reconciliation with that part of my life, to know that I am no longer that 16 year old. I received messages from many young men in Spain saying they felt so connected with what it was representing, and “Your music helped me to connect with my deeper self and being more open to myself and to what’s around me.” I don’t want people to live any other way.
You’re about to go to the Academy Gala and all these other events. Who are you most excited to meet?
I don’t know who to expect! I was very jealous of Los Javis being in Telluride, meeting Sofia Coppola, Julianne Moore. (Laughs.) I was actually doing a concert in Madrid and I wasn’t able to be there. But I would love to meet Luca Guadagnino. I bet he’s the coolest guy.