A nanny Amelia in Babel, filmmaker Alejandro González Iñárritu's multicultural exploration of how miscommunication affects our lives. The role presented her with challenges she had never encountered before—and yet what she remembers most clearly is the pure pleasure she took in inhabiting the part. "It was really a feast of acting to have done Amelia," she says, sighing happily.
Critics, movie buffs, and awards voters have taken note. Babel was initially publicized on the strengths of its big-name stars, Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett. But it is Mexican-born Barraza and Japanese castmate Rinko Kikuchi—unknowns in the States—who have taken center stage. Both actors were recently lauded with Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild Award nominations and picked up Breakthrough of the Year Awards from Hollywood Life magazine.
As Amelia, Barraza has what is arguably the film's most challenging arc. The character is introduced as someone with a fairly low-key life: She's a nanny, living in the United States illegally and caring for two children (Elle Fanning, Nathan Gamble) she deeply loves. When she decides to take her young charges to Mexico for her son's wedding, they end up stranded in the desert, struggling to survive. Barraza's performance is the undeniable anchor of these sequences, taking us on an emotionally shattering journey through Amelia's fear and desperation. In many ways she is the soul of Babel—the persona viewers can't help but empathize with, the character we worry most for as she's pushed to the brink of madness. As Salon.com writer Andrew O'Hehir noted in his review of Babel, "Ultimately, Barraza's noble, flawed Amelia feels like the tragic heroine of the entire film."
In person, Barraza is just as compelling—warm and effusive, switching seamlessly between using an interpreter and speaking English, which she's still mastering. During a Q&A session after a Back Stage screening of the film, she has an audience alternately laughing uproariously and fighting back tears as she recounts her Babel experience and gushes with enthusiasm over the kudos she's received so far. She can't quite believe the attention she's garnered for the role, especially considering that the character she plays isn't exactly a glamorous Hollywood type. "I just want to tell you that I'm very, very happy to be in this situation and to be received so well," she says. "I want to thank everybody who has helped me reach this point, from the bottom of my heart. This is not your normal character. It's a Mexican lady who is 50 and is not beautiful and charming like many other characters. But the audience has loved this character. I'm very thankful for that."
Barraza had worked with Iñárritu once before: in 2000's critically lauded Amores Perros, in which she played mother to lovelorn Octavio (Gael GarcÃa Bernal). Still, she wasn't the first person Iñárritu thought of when casting the role of Amelia. He auditioned hundreds of bilingual actors, searching for that perfect mix of strength, sadness, and vulnerability that defines the character. His wife, MarÃa Eladia, suggested Barraza, who was working on a Telemundo soap opera in Argentina when she got the call. "My brother called me from Mexico and told me that Alejandro was looking for me," she recalls. "I talked to Alejandro by phone, and I said, 'Obviously, I would be very thrilled to do another audition with you.' He sent me six scenes, and through his words on the phone, through his direction over the phone, I was taped, and I sent him two DVDs, and he really liked the second DVD."
Recalls Iñárritu, "Adriana sent a tape, and it was so good that I was almost crying. Every scene hit me in the heart and the gut. She has that quality of unconditional maternal love, [of someone] who is also tough and endures lots of pain." Before he cast her, however, the director had an important question for the actor. "He said, 'If I decide to [cast] you in this role, would you be willing to gain weight?'" Barraza remembers. "I said, 'Yes, I will cut my arm off, I will leave my hair short or make it long.' Because once I read the six scenes, I was like, 'This character is so amazing.'"
Barraza, who now looks nothing like Amelia, gained about 33 pounds and worked intensely with Iñárritu to develop the character. "Alejandro and I [were] looking for a special kind of walk, a special accent for [speaking]," she says. "These women carry in their shoulders the responsibility of life. Many times these women forget about their bodies, so that's what I did: I forgot about my body so that later on I could come back and maneuver it in the form that I did. At the moment that we found why Amelia was the way that she was, it was when everything came together, and it was a very fortunate discovery." That key moment, Barraza says, was "when I began walking like Amelia. In that moment, I felt the weight of the years that Amelia had and the responsibility and everything else that Amelia needed to have."
It was especially important to Iñárritu and Barraza that the character not come across as clichéd or stereotyped. "Alejandro told me many, many times about this danger," Barraza says. "He wants this character to be so, so [real]. [The way he directs is to] go deeper until it stops being dramatic. At that moment, you would reach what he actually was going for, which was to get a character that was very far away from being anything that wasn't real. It had to be very real, and that would keep it from being a cliché."
Barraza considers Babel to be a big break of sorts, referring to it as "the most important and well-known character" she's done. That said, her acting career began 36 years ago as, she says, "a complete error." When she was a little girl, she saw the Bolshoi Ballet in Mexico and was entranced. "In this moment, I felt, 'I want to do this for my life,'" she recalls. Later, she had to choose a school activity: theatre, basketball, or ballet. "I ran to the ballet line, and when I arrived, the lady told me, 'Sorry, but it's full,'" she says. "Then, I [thought], 'Well, I have two other options at this point.' It was either to be in the basketball team or to join the theatre group. I joined the theatre group, and ever since that day I've never wanted to get out of it. The most fortunate things in life, I believe that they find you, that you don't have to go searching for them."
Her passion for acting has taken many forms. She's a popular presence on Spanish-language television and notes that one of her soap opera characters, Clara DomÃnguez of Alguna Vez Tendremos Alas, still gets her recognized. She's also vice president in neutral accent and acting development for the Telemundo Network, and has been a sought-after acting and dialect coach for the past 27 years, having worked on a variety of Spanish-language soaps and the Adam Sandler film Spanglish. Teaching, she says, is one of the things that helps her delve deeper into her acting. "I love gossip," she says, laughing. "Not only gossip in our industry but just gossip—[as in] investigating about everything. When I started investigating about acting, I started to find my own mythology on this subject. And when you're a teacher, the students help you to realize these concepts that you have in your head. Being a teacher for such a long time has given me the opportunity to do, like, a trial and error until I find what I'm looking for for a character."
Barraza is also a director, a skill she decided to pick up after working as a coach and actor in television. "Many times my friends, the [Spanish-language] soap opera producers, asked me if I want to direct their soap operas," she says. "I thought, 'No. I have to study direction first.' I studied four directorial courses, and when I had a natural concept of what directing was, I was able to do it."
Perhaps her work as a director contributes to the deep connection she shares with Iñárritu, a bond that was nurtured on Amores Perros. She heard about the film from a casting-director friend and eventually auditioned for Iñárritu. "At that moment he immediately chose me, and I started taping," she says, still sounding a bit surprised. "One of the casting directors told me that it was the first time that anybody had been cast on the spot and started filming immediately, so she was wondering, 'What did you do so that Alejandro could choose you?' And I said, 'Oh, I just twisted his [arm].'"
Watching the completed version of Amores Perros for the first time helped her understand the director's intense, perfectionist methods. "I saw my own acting [in Amores Perros] and I [didn't] recognize myself," she says. "I like, very much, this moment. I have 36 years as an actress, and more or less I know what I'm gonna look like. But in Amores Perros I didn't recognize myself, and I love this moment. In this moment, I understand Alejandro. I understood that what he wanted was to rob it of the drama. And then when we started shooting Babel, Gael GarcÃa [Bernal, who plays Amelia's nephew in the film] and I talked to Alejandro, and I told Alejandro, 'Okay, I know that you [do] many, many takes.' And with this character, who is so dramatic, who has to suffer so much, I really expected it to be hell. But [now that] I understand the purpose of this very special person who is Alejandro, I told him, 'Okay, Alejandro, I understand your method. Okay, I [will] play with you.'"
She recalls at least one instance when she surprised the meticulous director with her fierce dedication to the role. "In the scene when [Amelia] was in front of the border officer, we shot this scene from 8:30 in the morning until 9 in the night. I cry and suffer many times," she remembers. "Alejandro said, 'Great, great, this is correct.' And I said, 'No, no, no—please, please, how about if we [do one more take]; let's try to go this way with it.' And he [said], 'Gee, you're crazier than I am.'"
Ultimately, she says, Iñárritu is a true actor's director. "There is respect and love," she says. "[As actors] we have many, many types of directors: the director that only makes instructions—'You're here, you're here, and you cry, please, please, because my time [is limited].' But Alejandro first loves the actor. And he is so clear in his mind. He has many, many ways to explain the situation or the character."
This came in handy when Barraza had to shoot Amelia's emotional scenes in the desert. For 18 days, she was put through her paces in a blistering hot, physically grueling environment. "The desert in the night is so, so scary," she says. "The coyotes howl. You can hear the snakes. And the darkness is terrible."
She can't help but remember one particularly intense scene that didn't end up in the finished film; it's the one that ultimately helped her get a handle on her character. In the scene, the sun is coming up and Amelia is trying to distract the children from the heat, so she tells them a story. Barraza had to keep her voice very calm yet maintain a look of terror as she searched the barren landscape, hoping to find help. "We weren't getting it," she remembers. "So Alejandro called me over to his trailer at night, and he told me, 'We haven't gotten it; I want you to take a look.' So we ran the dailies on the video assist. I had never wanted to see the character, and that was the first time." Barraza can't help but tear up as she recalls the emotional impact of seeing herself on screen. She saw, she says, "this old woman."
"I really, truly [felt] a deep compassion for that poor woman," she says. "I kept saying, 'They're gonna die.' That night, I couldn't even sleep, because I kept thinking about Amelia and the poor children." From then on, Barraza says, "the important thing was to achieve having the viewer put him- or herself in Amelia's shoes for just a moment, the way it happened to me."
Ultimately that moment of empathy is what's essential for Barraza in any role—that and, as she said before, being just crazy enough to truly believe in the scene, in the situation, in the character. "By being an actor and really believing in the fantasy of acting, you are really able to master [a role]," she says. "Everything else just comes into place after you reach that point."