A leading man who never asks to be liked and a narrator who never raises his voice. Daniel Giménez Cacho's best work is with Alfonso Cuarón, where his dryness does the film's correcting for it, and most of the time it holds.
Fi1m perspective
There is a moment early in Sólo con tu pareja (1992) when Tomás Tomás, advertising copywriter, has a nurse in one flat and his boss in another on the same night, and the only way between them is the ledge. Most actors would play the ledge for panic. Daniel Giménez Cacho plays it as an inconvenience. He gives Tomás the charm of a man who has never needed to be anything else, and then lets that charm run down in front of us without once asking to be liked. That refusal to court us is the thing he does that other leading men do not.
He trained in theatre in Mexico City and came up through Mexican television before the film work began in the late 1980s. Cuarón's first film made him a lead; Guillermo del Toro's Cronos (1993) followed, and later Pedro Almodóvar's Bad Education (2004) and Alejandro González Iñárritu's Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths (2022), where he plays the lead. We have not reviewed those and will not pretend to have weighed them. What we can vouch for is the pair with Cuarón, and they show the two sides of him plainly.
The second side is the voice. In Y Tu Mamá También (2001) he never appears; he narrates, flat and dry, cutting into the boys' road trip to widen the film until it takes in Mexico's economic divisions. The delivery is the point: he will not sound impressed by the adventure, so we cannot be either. We were grateful for that voice and, more than once, mildly irritated by it in the same minute, because the flatness that checks the boys is also what makes a few of those passages sound like a lesson pinned to a scene that already had enough going on. That is a fault of where Cuarón and Alex Rodríguez placed the interruptions rather than of how he read them, but he is the one we hear.
So he is an actor who lets a character be unattractive and a narrator who declines to be warm, and Cuarón is the director who has known what to do with both. Profiles report that collaborators find almost nothing to fault in him, which is not a sentence we have ever fully trusted about anyone, and on two films we are not in a position to argue. Start with Tomás on the ledge. Then put on Y Tu Mamá También and listen for the man who is not in it.
Biography
Daniel Giménez Cacho is a Spanish-Mexican actor. Born on 15 May 1961 in Madrid, he moved to Mexico as a child and studied theatre at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). He made his film debut in Camino largo a Tijuana (1989) and appeared in Cronos (1993).
He has worked with directors including Guillermo del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón, Jorge Fons and Pedro Almodóvar. His voice is heard as the narrator in Y tu mamá también (2001). Other credits include Bad Education (2004), El Infierno (2010), Blancanieves (2012) and Memoria (2021).
Giménez Cacho has received multiple Ariel Awards, including for Cronos, Profundo Carmesí (1996), Aro Tolbukhin (2002), Nicotina (2003), Colosio: el asesinato (2012) and Bardo, falsa crónica de unas cuantas verdades (2022).
