"My story is not about the guy who always wanted to be an actor," says Edgar Ramirez. "It was something just organic. I felt very self-conscious introducing myself as an actor." Fluent in Italian, German, English, French, and Spanish, the Venezuela-born Ramirez was in his home country finishing his college degree in international relations and struggling between his love of politics and love of the arts. "I always had this huge interest in the political area—international relations, geopolitics, and communication for development and all of that," he says. "At the same time, I was also very drawn by the world of the arts and movies and the performing arts. I never thought of acting as a career. In the different schools I was [in], I would join the theatre club and the cultural activities, but I never thought of it as a career for me."
The actor was so intent on a career in politics that when he was approached by screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga—then a professor in Mexico—to star in a film, Ramirez passed it up. "I was going to Harvard that year for the National Model U.N., and I was feeling my other side of interest," he says. "Two years later, this guy comes back to Venezuela, and I was already working in politics here, and he was not coming from Mexico, he was coming from Cannes, and the film was Amores Perros."
Ramirez says that's when he found room in his life for acting and diplomacy. Today he is a cinema star in Latin America, and in America he has established a film career in fiery, heart-pounding action thrillers. In The Bourne Ultimatum, Ramirez is featured as Paz, an especially formidable opponent for Matt Damon's franchise hero Jason Bourne. American audiences were first introduced to Ramirez in Tony Scott's Domino, in which the soft-spoken actor played vicious bounty hunter Choco. In February the actor can be seen in Vantage Point, opposite Forest Whitaker, Dennis Quaid, and Matthew Fox. Ramirez is currently heading to Puerto Rico to begin production of The Argentine, a Che Guevara biopic starring Benicio Del Toro. Ramirez has also stepped into producing, starting with a film in which he also stars: Cyrano Fernandez, a dramatic contemporary adaptation of the French play Cyrano de Bergerac, set in a Venezuelan favela, will premiere at AFI Fest this November in Los Angeles.
At first glance, becoming an actor is a far cry from working at the U.N., but Ramirez insists the motivation—telling the story of people who are without a voice—is the same. "At the very end, I think I'm still doing as an actor what I wanted to do as a diplomat slash politician, which is keep on exploring human nature," he says. "That's how I see it. And I think that you as a journalist, me as an actor, other people as anthropologists and sociologists—what we're all doing is trying to deal with human nature and trying to get answers. I think that as an actor it is probably the most poetic way I've found to keep doing that research."
Drawing on his interest in human studies, the actor is quick to add that the characters he has played shouldn't be labeled as bad but as victims of several small choices. "I don't label my characters, the same way I don't label people. I think that labels like 'bad guy' or 'good guy' or 'cute guy' or 'ugly guy' are labels more for marketing," he explains. "I understand the reason for those labels to exist, but I think that as an actor, that is something that I don't connect to. I think that we are all good and bad at the same time. It's just a matter of circumstances. It's just a matter of what your motivations are and what you want to get in life, and so are characters, because characters are people, so re-creating reality is something very serious—[you can't] just put a label on it.
"I find it very interesting to deal with characters that have a lot of contradictions that can be morally ambiguous," he says. "The more contradictions the character has, the more interesting it is for an actor to play, because that is life: how you, I, and everybody else is. For certain people we might be angels, and for others we might be demons, and who's right and who's wrong?"
Although his most-publicized American roles to date could politely be referred to as morally ambiguous, Ramirez's real life aspiration as an actor is to be a bridge between real people and imagined characters. "I don't want to state it as a dogma, like, 'Real artists should have or should do something.' However, I think—especially coming from a third-world country, coming from a country like Venezuela, from this part of the world, from this region with so many things to be solved, with so many causes to be heard, so many problems to be addressed—we have a social responsibility," he says. "I think that it's a huge responsibility to really give voice to people and to causes who don't have it. I think that is very important. At the same time, I don't want to sound dogmatic, but I think, personally, that I have a social responsibility to give back a little of what I've got so far."