Tonatiuh Stars Alongside Jennifer Lopez in Sundance Hit ‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’
Name: Tonatiuh
Sundance project: “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” a rare big-name director musical drama in the sea of small indies at Sundance. The movie, from “Chicago” writer and “Dreamgirls” director Bill Condon, is a screen adaptation of the Terrence McNally theater production, which in turn was based on the 1976 novel by Manuel Puig. The film stars Tonatiuh alongside Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna, and was met with a standing ovation and immediate Oscar buzz when it premiered at the festival on Saturday.
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Notable past credits: The actor, who goes by just his first name, was recently seen in the Netflix holiday season thriller “Carry On” with Jason Bateman, Taron Edgerton and Sofia Carson.
“Kiss of the Spider Woman”: The story is set in an Argentinian prison in the early ’80s, following Molina (Tonatiuh), a gay hairdresser serving a sentence for corrupting a minor.
Tonatiuh was familiar with the show, and upon reading the film’s script immediately connected to it.
“Molina, one of the characters I play, he felt like a loser in life, and he’s living in an authoritarian government that wrongfully imprisoned him, which is a metaphor for the imprisonment that he feels inside of his own body and inside of his own culture. And that was a lot of my lived experience,” Tonatiuh says.
“I’m gender queer, and so my personal expression has changed so much over the years. When I was younger, I hated muffling my femininity. And so I was so aggressive, ‘I’m going to f–k gender, I’m going to be everything.’ And no one could tell me what to do and how to be and what to look like,” Tonatiuh explains. “Over time, Hollywood wears you down. It really starts making you hate yourself because you don’t know why things aren’t lining up. Hollywood made me start really wondering if I had to change who I am to accommodate a system that doesn’t necessarily understand what I’m selling. And in the process of even auditioning for [‘Kiss of the Spider Woman’], I rediscovered so much of the things that I forgot about myself.”
Born and raised in Los Angeles, Tonatiuh got to live out his “secret dream” of musical theater during the film’s three-plus-month shoot in New York. Many of the film’s dancers are Broadway performers, and in his spare time he’d get to go watch their shows.
“I’m a theater nerd. That’s what I grew up on,” he says. “And also working with the legends, literally doing musical numbers with Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna and working with Bill f–king Condon…the theater nerd in me really just was coming alive.”
Tonatiuh felt especially inspired bringing the film to Sundance in the week following President Trump’s inauguration and the administration’s actions toward the LGBTQIA+ community.
“It’s important for me, for all our communities, especially the LGBTQ community, to know that no one can tell you who you are. You determine that for yourself, and you get to express yourself however you see fit, and we love you for it,” he says. “And to provide joy. I think that it’s easy to get overwhelmed and feel despondent at times or helpless. Art really does allow us to find levity in life. It allows us to envision something that we want or aspire to, or what we want to create the community we want to build. And I think that’s why this whole space is so special.”
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