Antonio Banderas ditched his lavish Hollywood lifestyle and almost a decade later, he still has no regrets.
Banderas, a 65-year-old actor, returned to his hometown of Malaga, Spain in 2017. Banderas said the impetus for the big move was a near-fatal heart attack.
“I had a really serious warning,” he said of the heart attack in an interview with The Times published Wednesday. “My outlook on life has changed.”
The newspaper noted that before his serious health crisis, Banderas lived between the United States and the United Kingdom and had a mansion in Cobham, Surrey.
After that, the “Desperado” star quickly quit smoking, sold his private jet, returned to Malaga and bought a theater.
“In the face of death, I looked back and realized that I was actually a theater actor,” he explained.
Banderas currently lives in an apartment with his longtime girlfriend, Nicole Kimpel, and owns multiple restaurants. But Teatro del Soho, a nonprofit theater, is his greatest passion.
“I have never been happier,” he said.
Banderas also reflected on how he became a Hollywood superstar, saying his fears about not having English as his first language disappeared after he married his now ex-wife, Melanie Griffith. The two divorced in 2015 after 18 years of marriage.
He said he was initially told that as a Spaniard he could only play “villains” in movies, but he proved that wrong with 1998’s “The Mask of Zorro.”
“The problem was, years later, I was wearing a mask, a hat, a sword, a cloak. The bad guy was Captain Love, who had blonde hair and blue eyes,” he said.
He continued, “Even more important is[his 2011 film]Puss in Boots, because it’s for young kids. They see a cat with a Spanish accent, even an Andalusian accent, and he’s a good guy.”
Banderas told Page Six in a December 2022 interview that his heart attack was “one of the best things” that ever happened to him.
“I realized that this was probably one of the best things that happened in my life, because there was no point in being unimportant and worrying about it every day,” he explained.
He said that after his near-death experience, he began to distance himself from “things that I used to think were important but actually weren’t.”
“If I’m going to die, why worry about that?” he recalled. “I always knew (I was going to die), but now I know. I saw it here.”
