When Bill Condon made Dreamgirls in 2006, he cast an unknown Jennifer Hudson opposite well-known costars Eddie Murphy, Jaime Foxx, and Beyoncé. She emerged from the experience a star and an Oscar winner. Now, in the writer-director’s latest musical, Kiss of the Spider Woman, history may well repeat as young actor Tonatiuh goes toe-to-toe with Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez and emerges a star.
“It was a wonderful gift that Ben Affleck gave me, who runs a company that financed the movie, and having had Diego and Jennifer agree, and say, ‘Just go find the best person,’’’ says Condon during a visit to the Bay Area where the Mill Valley Film Festival was screening the film and feting Tonatiuh with a special spotlight.
“Thank God, because if in addition to everything else, they had to have a star, Timothée Chalamet would be sitting here today,” adds Tonatiuh.
In a way, Kiss of the Spider Woman has been nearly 50 years in the making. The 69-year-old Condon was 23 when he first read Manuel Puig’s novel, set in an Argentine prison, in which queer window dresser Molina spins tales from his favorite movies to entertain his reluctant Communist cellmate, Valentin.
“I saw a lot of myself in Molina, because of the movie love and the love of especially Hollywood movies of the midcentury, the Golden Age of Hollywood,” Condon says. “There weren’t that many novels like that that were both serious and camp, that didn’t shy away from camp, and I thought that was great.”
In 1983, Puig adapted the novel into a play. Then in 1985, came Hector Babenco’s film starring Raul Julia as Valentin and William Hurt as Molina, a role for which he won the Best Actor Oscar.
“It was just remarkable to see William Hurt at the absolute pinnacle of his career, take on this gay role, because that, as you know, didn’t happen at all. So that felt, it just felt thrilling to see this dramatized,” Condon says.
Then in 1993 (the same year Tonatiuh was born), came the Broadway musical with a book by Terence McNally and music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb, the duo famous for Cabaret and Chicago. The show won Tonys for Best Musical, its three leads, book, and score. And of all the various iterations of the story, it was the one that Condon seized upon when he decided to put his own imprint on the story.
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“Why do it again?” Condon says. “It was revisiting the novel. It was in some basic way, specifically the idea that you strip away everything that we use to identify ourselves, and put two people in a place where they can’t escape from each other, and the fact that they are able to see who the other person is, and find kindness and find love through that. And it’s not about any kind of, are they? Is he? Is one of them, gay, straight, whatever, trans? It’s just about these two individuals.”
“That felt powerful to me, and I felt that aspect hadn’t been kept [in previous versions].”
The part of Molina is key to Kiss of the Spider Woman’s success, and it is a challenging role. Well, two challenging roles. In the prison sequences, as Molina, his femme mannerisms and speech initially irritate Valentin. But as he weaves his Scheherazade-like tales of his favorite star Ingrid Luna’s (Lopez) movie, in his MGM-musical fantasy, he casts himself as her character Aurora’s secretary Kendall Nesbit, bitten by jealousy as she begins a romance with the handsome Armando (Luna).
To prepare, Tonatiuh, a Los Angeles native who is nonbinary and uses he/they pronouns, watched a bootleg of the Broadway show as well as the 1985 film and they read the novel. They listened to every version of the Kander and Ebb songs that they could find. And they asked Condon for a syllabus of all the films he was going to reference in the musical as they worked to build Nesbit as a character who exists completely apart from Molina.
“That was an actor’s gift Bill gave me,” Tonatiuh says. “With Molina, I wanted to tell a genderless expression. Then with Kendall, I really wanted to look at what masculinity is through a classic Hollywood lens. And so, I modeled it after Gene Kelly or Montgomery Clift. I had Errol Flynn’s hair, and so I really wanted to get that Mid-Atlantic style of acting to juxtapose it so starkly from Molina, and then at the very end, of course, like the full feminine fantasy. In a weird way, I got to play the entire gender spectrum.”
Condon shot the film in two parts, beginning with the musical. He had Lopez’s picture on his wall all the time he was writing, imagining her in the role in which she is both the alluring Aurora and the sinister Spider Woman. He confesses he is not sure what he would have done had she turned down the movie.
It was not just that she was the actor he imagined in the movie; it’s also that she is someone who actually embodies that old-fashioned glamor and he is hard-pressed to name any other contemporary performer who does.
“She can also knock out take after take after giant, sweeping singular take,” says Tonatiuh.
When the musical portion was finished, the production moved on to Uruguay to what had been an actual prison until the 1980s. Condon shot these scenes in sequence, so that the intimacy between Molina and Valentin could develop organically. Tonatiuh likens filming there to the Stanford Prison Experiment, for the way the film’s theatrical representation of prison life mirrored reality. Among a crew and supporting cast made up primarily of Uruguayans and Argentineans, many were also only too aware of the real-life abuses that took place in jails such as this one during the 1970s.
“Everybody, at some point, came up and shared a story about a grandfather, an uncle, a cousin who’d been disappeared or killed, or everybody went through their own period of repression,” Condon says. “We were living among people who had lived through this, and that made it feel like there’s texture to that, and a responsibility.”
And much as Molina’s life is forever changed by his exposure to Valentin (and vice versa), so is Tonatiuh’s by their place within Kiss of the Spider Women’s starry ensemble. It might have been an overwhelming experience, but the actor, whose CV includes roles in independent features, television, and most recently, the Netflix action thriller Carry On, was ready for it.
“The only difference between intimidation and excitement is breath,” they say. “And I have been training for this my entire life. And so, it felt like I was getting recruited to come to the Team America Olympics, just because it’s all these people that I admire. And it felt like they extended a hand, and I was like, ‘Let’s go onto this wild, wild ride.’
“Bill emailed me and asked me to read with Diego during the audition process. And I think I wrote something along the lines of, ‘I’m in, but let’s make one promise, let’s make some magic.’”
Kiss of the Spider Woman is currently playing in Bay Area theaters.
