INTERVIEW: Alex Rich works with Antonio Banderas to draw portrait of Picasso
Photo: Alex Rich plays Pablo Picasso in Season 2 of National Geographic’s Genius. Photo courtesy of National Geographic/Dusan Martincek / Provided with permission from Nat Geo press site.
National Geographic brings back its successful Genius series with a 10-episode portrait of the memorable artist Pablo Picasso, a man whose output continues to engage hordes of museum-going visitors every year. Genius: Picasso, following on the heels of Genius: Einstein, premieres Tuesday, April 24 at 9 p.m. with a double episode.
Playing the older Picasso is Antonio Banderas, and playing the younger Picasso is Alex Rich, an actor best known for GLOW and True Detective. Rich’s part in the film offers an intimate view on the artist’s life in the years before his international fame. The story tracks his formative years in Spain and his eventual bohemian lifestyle amongst a circle of friends in France. A through-line between both versions of Picasso is the dedication to his art and his often unsettled personal life.
“I didn’t know anything really about him,” Rich said in a recent phone interview. “I didn’t even really know that he was much of a womanizer, so I had very little information about who Picasso was. The nice part about doing the show is that — and also being in Europe and going to the museums — was as I was finding out about his life and about the people in it.”
It’s not every project that finds two actors portraying the same character at different stages in his life. This meant Rich and Banderas needed to work closely so the audience would buy into their performances.
“Antonio is an incredibly gracious person to collaborate with,” Rich said. “It was so lovely. I got so much in being able to work with him because his willingness to develop our concept of how to approach Pablo together was so welcoming. He had so much knowledge and so much experience, and being able to go to set and watch him and have discussions about different nuanced things that we wanted to bring through as character traits that we could carry from one timeline to the other and just develop a cohesive guy. It was a wonderful experience and one that I think a lot of actors don’t have the luxury of exploring. He couldn’t have been more gracious in that way.”
When Genius premieres, there’s a good chance Rich will be watching, but seeing himself on the big screen or small screen can still be a nerve-racking experience for the up-and-coming actor.
“I’m still early on in my career, so I don’t even know if I have that perspective yet,” he said. “I think it takes me a little bit to get used to watching my own performances, and I think to be objective takes a bit of time so you don’t remember the moments that you were choosing between the different takes you had and the different options you were considering in your mind for how to make a scene. … I still find myself glaring at different little moments and picking apart performances in ways that are counterproductive when I’m watching.”
Rich’s background is actually in music, and the connection with his acting career is that both forms of art allow him to tell stories.
“I’ve always had interest in storytelling, but I’ve focused primarily on my music for the majority of my life until about a couple of years ago, about three or four years ago,” he said. “I switched gears, and I had to find a new way to tell my stories. And acting was a great outlet for that, being able to introduce my story with some of the people on the page. … It was a really great way for me to find a path that felt similar and still nuanced and deep and rich and important to me.”
Working on Genius: Picasso allowed Rich to travel quite deep into the Picasso character, a man who earned a lot of adulation, dedication, fame and controversies.
“I love that we had 10 hours to explore this character because there’s so much to his life, and we were able to go through a lot of it,” Rich said. “It’s really nice to be able to focus on the first half and for Antonio to focus on the second half because we were able to accomplish a level of depth that if one actor was trying to play the whole life would be impossible and less interesting to watch. You’d have much less time to develop that richness, and also the juxtaposition of the two characters and their differences is part of the fun of exploring the story this way because you get to see their differences and wonder how one gets to the other. And then as the series progresses, you figure out the missing pieces, so I think that is all incredibly lovely about this project.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Genius: Picasso premieres Tuesday, April 24 at 9 p.m. on National Geographic. Click here for more information.
