A quiet Mexican character actor whose reputation at home rests on ordinary men who go bad by degrees, mostly in Luis Estrada's satires. We have met him only on his American jobs, where he is handed less and still gives the film its best scene.
Fi1m perspective
About halfway through Blue Beetle (2023), a superhero film whose plot came off the shelf, a father sits on a porch and talks to his son. Nothing explodes. Damián Alcázar plays Alberto Reyes quietly, and the talk is the best written scene in the film and the best played. We noticed afterwards that we had started to feel protective of the Reyes family, which superhero films almost never manage with anyone who does not wear a suit, and most of that was the dinner table and that porch.
He had been doing this for nearly forty years by then. Alcázar began in Mexican theatre in the mid-1980s, made his first film around 1985 and rose through the 1990s in supporting and lead parts. The turn came with Luis Estrada's Herod's Law (1999), in which he played Juan Vargas, a small man handed a small town and the means to ruin it. He has made four films with Estrada, including El Infierno (2010), a narco satire with Alcázar as El Benny at its centre, and he has three with the actor Joaquín Cosío. The Crime of Padre Amaro (2002) put him in a cassock as Padre Natalio Pérez. The pattern is plain: Mexican cinema keeps casting him in stories about corruption, politics and the drug trade, and keeps him at the middle of them. We have not reviewed those films and will not pretend to have weighed them, but they are where his standing was built.
The English-language work started with The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008), as Lord Sopespian, and grew with Narcos, where he arrives in the third season as Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela, the elder of the Cali brothers, opposite Francisco Denis as Miguel. That season is quieter and better made than the first, and the series had by then lost its centre and carried on. The man the writing follows is Jorge Salcedo, the head of security who cannot get out, and Alcázar's Gilberto is the authority he cannot get out from under. It is a convincing boss. It is also a part built to be feared from the next room rather than watched in it.
That is the trouble with the American work, and it is not his. Studios cast him as the father or the patriarch and give him a scene or two, when his gift, on the evidence of the films his own country prizes, is for the man at the centre who does the wrong thing slowly and knows it. He has said he has shot more than sixty films and counts García, directed by José Luis Rugeles, among his favourites; we have seen a fraction of them. If you know him only from Narnia, Cali and the Reyes porch, you have seen a fine actor doing a small job well. The larger job is in Spanish, and we would like to review it.
Biography
Damián Alcázar is a Mexican actor born on 8 January 1953 in Jiquilpan, Michoacán. He trained at the National Institute of Fine Arts, the Theatrical Experimentation Centre and the Faculty of Theatre at Veracruz University, where he later taught. He spent eight years acting with two theatre companies in Mexico, including a production of Jean Genet's The Balcony directed by George Labaudan.
Alcázar has appeared in more than twenty-eight Mexican films and six foreign productions. He is known for roles in La ley de Herodes (1999), El crimen del padre Amaro (2002), Crónicas (2004) and El infierno (2010). Internationally he played Lord Sopespian in The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) and Gilberto Rodríguez Orejuela in the Netflix series Narcos. He portrayed Alberto Reyes in Blue Beetle (2023).
He has received multiple Ariel Awards, including Best Actor in 1999 and 2004. Alcázar has also served as a deputy in the Constituent Assembly of Mexico City representing the MORENA party.
