‘I Feel Like I’ve Been Training For This Job My Entire Life’

Academy Award winner Bill Condon, the director of beloved musicals such as Chicago, Dreamgirls and The Greatest Showman, is back with Kiss of the Spider Woman, a dazzling and luminous adaptation of the stage musical of the same name (which is itself adapted from Manuel Puig’s novel, published in 1976).

Kiss of the Spider Woman tells the gripping story of Valentín (Diego Luna), a political prisoner during the Dirty War in Argentina in the 1980s. He ends up sharing his cell with Molina (Tonatiuh), a young window dresser accused of public indecency. They soon form a bond over Molina’s tells of Ingrid Luna’s movies (Jennifer Lopez), his favorite Hollywood musical star.

Half of the movie takes place inside the cell, with Molina reenacting some of Ingrid Luna’s scenes, but Kiss of the Spider Woman is Molina’s favorite movie.

The other half of the movie takes us inside the diva’s films, with lavishing musical numbers reminiscent of the Golden Age musicals in Technicolor. These sequences are elevated by Lopez’s performance, who delivers a career’s best. Diego Luna gives a poignant and vulnerable performance, but Tonatiuh’s dual, breakout performance as Molina and Kendall, skyrockets the actor as one of Hollywood’s next big star.

I spoke with Tonatiuh over zoom and asked the actor about performing as two different people in Kiss of the Spider Woman, and particularly about the unique way each of these characters dance and express themselves through these musical numbers, as well as how it helped him understand these characters better.

“Thank you for that great question! We shot two different movies, we shot the musical movie and we shot the prison movie, so there are a couple of instances where they combine. So my whole mission was to create completely different energies between those two. I wanted a classic Hollywood Montgomery Clift, Gene Kelly kind of vibe for Kendall. And then for Molina, I just wanted to bring as much authenticity and truth to their story as possible.”

He added: “The fun part as an actor was how can I embed two different pieces of Molina into Kendall, but keeping them authentic. And conversely, when we’re in the prison, Molina is excited to meet his favorite diva and he is living in their fantasy. So how do we make that transition from awkward to clunky, to all of a sudden, nailing that final pose in ‘Where you Are’. It’s just finding that little arc and thinking about it.”

The actor then explained how Bill Condon decided to cut the two movies in a way that would link the stories together. He said, “There’s a lot of cool Easter eggs too that we did, where Bill wanted to cut back between those two worlds. Because we shot the musical first, I was able to recall, ‘Oh, this is the moment where Jennifer crosses her legs, this is the moment where I put my hand out that I can plant later for a different cut.’ So we put a lot of Easter eggs in there too for the audience to pay attention to.”

Tonatiuh then talked about how his background in theatre helped him bring to life Molina’s performance inside the cell, as he recalls the spotlights and the gorgeous sets of some of his favorite movies.

He said, “I feel like I’ve been training for this job my entire life! I’ve been working for the last 12 years so it was nice to finally arrive at this moment, because there was this fusion between film, musical and actual theatre, right? The prison cell was a two hand play for the most part. And we shot it in sequence so, when Molina enters the prison cell for the first time and sees Valentín, that was the first time that Diego and I ever saw ourselves as our characters. And so every passing scene, every trauma, every moment, we built that chemistry and love together. But the theatre training really came in handy because Bill wanted one take in the musical if we could get them. And then in the play, it’s a lot of monologue. So some days we would go from page 6 to 21, uninterrupted, on a tight.”

Kiss of the Spider Woman is a deeply human story about love, passion, resilience and sacrifice. It celebrates the full spectrum of love and our passion and respect for the arts. Molina finds a way to escape the grim and violent world they live in, through Ingrid Luna’s films. At the same time, he also helps Valentín discover a new part of himself too.

I asked Condon what movies helped him escape real life when he was a kid, aspiring to become a filmmaker one day.

He said, “I think I was a dark little boy, so I discovered Hitchcock movies. They were suddenly released to NBC when I was a kid, so mine was Rear Window. I became obsessed with Hitchcock, I think it was my first obsession.”

He added: “And then of course I discovered musicals, and specifically Sweet Charity, that first Bob Fosse movie, when I was young. And that just kind of overwhelmed me, it was both lavish and a G-rated musical about a prostitute, if you can imagine such a thing! So it had lightness and dark at the same time. But I was lucky because then I grew up in the 1970s which I think we can all acknowledge was a high point for American movies. So it was an obsession that just got fed every week by some other interesting things.”

At the end of the film, Valentín is released alongside thousands of prisoners, after months, even years of torture and imprisonment. Slowly, the end credits start rolling, and a slow top shot shows us the prisoners rejoicing around Valentín. There is no music to accompany the credits, or at least, not right away. Instead, we hear the screams of the jubilant crowd from afar and the cries of all these free men.

“I think at the end of the day, musicals should have a happy ending, and it’s very hard to find a happy ending in this story,” Condon told me.

He added: “But as I was researching about Argentina at the time that Manuel Puig wrote it, and the Junta fell in 1983. The people were freed, all the political prisoners were freed. So I pushed it just a few years to that day, because I felt that the sacrifice that Molina had made in the movie within the movie, where he sacrifices himself, well I just wanted to make that parallel: that his sacrifice in real life had some meaning.”