Santiago Cabrera | Interview + 'The Musketeers' BTS video
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GulfTimes: ‘For me acting is physical’
As a youngster, actor Santiago Cabrera was constantly on the move. His dad was a diplomat and Cabrera figures he spent a third of his life in England, a third in his family’s native Chile and one-third just moving around.
By the time he was 10 he was already fluent in English when the family relocated to London. As he’d attended an American school in their last post in Romania, he spoke with an American accent. “But I was a shy 10-year-old in a new school and I went into ‘British’ in a matter of days just to blend in,” he says in a meeting room of a hotel here in Pasadena, California.
He’s been trying to blend in ever since. “Not necessarily did I ever feel like I fit in,” he says in a clipped British accent. “Even in Chile I’m a bit different because I’ve been living abroad and abroad is something different. I think that’s why there’s comfort in creating characters. You get to explore so many things that you know, aspects that you have, but maybe you don’t use them in real life.”
Cabrera has been plumbing those aspects for 16 years. He’s played the Austrian composer Mozart in Amadeus, the English aristocrat Sir Lancelot in Merlin, the New York artist who paints the future in Heroes, as well as a Cuban guerilla, a Mexican priest, a Hungarian war correspondent and now a dashing French cavalier in BBC America’s The Musketeers.
Cabrera remembers always being an observer. “I hung out with all the guys who got into trouble but I was very shy, so I just watched a lot. Then I would imitate, that’s one of the things I did. When we lived in London you’re fascinated by all the accents you hear and I went to Catholic school so my classmates were all Irish. So when I’d go to their house they’d have the Irish accent so I would imitate a lot.”
His parents would host dinner parties and his dad would wake him and encourage him to show off for the guests. “He’d say, ‘Do a Scottish accent.’ ‘Do an Irish accent.’ I’d go around the whole spectrum.”
Cabrera, 36, was also good at sports, another way of fitting in quickly, he says. In fact he played semi-pro soccer, but says he never considered it as a career. “I make parallels, especially in theatre, which is where I started: the dressing room, the getting dressed together, the teamwork, the rehearsal - all of that is very similar to being in a sport. So straightaway it was like something I’d been doing all my life.
“I do think for me acting is physical. I’ve always approached it from a physical perspective. I love the training. You can intellectualise and sit down, which helps a lot of the time, but at the end of the day you have to get on your feet and do it.”
When he was first starting out he snagged small parts on British television. “I remember one of my first shows was a video game, a motion-capture character and they told me how much they paid me - it was less than 1,000 pounds a day or something but I thought I was rich. ‘Really? For three days’ work? That kind of money?’
“Then you go out and see the real world and you’re grinding every day and you always question it, but when you can do it, it’s the greatest job in the world.”
While he was struggling he pursued a variety of jobs: a bar man, waiter, he even tried to become a professional party planner, but that didn’t fly. His most unique job was pulling a rickshaw.
“Rickshaw driving in London was odd because the clients are drunk people,” he says. “You go to the West End around 7 or 8pm and for the first couple of hours you see the tourists point and think about it, but then they go, ‘No, it’s fine.’ Then when everyone starts boozing, they’re on the rickshaw in two seconds. So it’s kind of funny to see it from the other side ... but it was good money, you can make pretty good money and you stay fit as well.”
Cabrera has been married for nine years to writer-director Anna Marcea. He says they make it a rule to never be apart longer than two weeks - a challenge since his career keeps him flying the friendly skies. “We work it out that whatever trip or whatever project I’m doing, we plan that she’ll either visit or I’ll visit after every two weeks,” he says. They lucked out on The Musketeers. It was filmed in Prague and Marcea accompanied him.
Cabrera plays Aramis, the suave lover of the trio, in The Musketeers. He was the only actor not in Britain when they were casting, so he sent an audition tape playing a sort of generic Musketeer.
“They approached me again and said, ‘We’re interested in you for Aramis.’ And that’s when it really came (to me). I loved it from the get-go but when I saw that character it really spoke to me. I saw a way in, and then it’s always a leap of faith because you can see the potential in it and hope it will go in that direction. And I think everything was better than you could’ve hoped for.