Jordi Mollà is Hollywood's reliable Spanish villain, the drug lord or the king, and his habit is to let you see that the man underneath is frightened. It is a good habit, and it has been spent on more films than it needed to be.
Fi1m perspective
Watch what Jordi Mollà does when a script hands him power. In Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) he is Philip II of Spain, building a fleet and praying over it, the king who most wants Cate Blanchett's queen off her throne. The obvious choice is menace. Mollà plays a man who would rather be somewhere else. He has said he saw Philip as "a little scared but couldn’t let on what he was really feeling", and that is the Mollà move in a sentence: the villain's fear, shown just enough that we notice and the other characters do not.
He arrived in Bigas Luna's Jamón jamón (1992), alongside Penélope Cruz and Javier Bardem, and spent the 1990s as a leading man in Spanish cinema, in La buena estrella (1997) and Segunda piel (1999). He has made three films each with Luna and with Peter Greenaway. Then came Blow (2001), his Hollywood debut as the volatile partner to Johnny Depp, and Hollywood decided it knew what to do with him. What it did was cast him as the Latin bad guy: a Cuban drug lord in Bad Boys II (2003), the antagonists of Knight and Day (2010) and Riddick (2013), a Venezuelan president in the series Jack Ryan (2018). Spanish critics have been pointing out the pattern for years, and it is hard to argue with.
Our one review is honest about the problem. Shekhar Kapur runs Philip's fleet alongside Mary, Queen of Scots in her locked house and Elizabeth falling for a sailor, and pitches all three stories at the top for 114 minutes. We found the dresses superb and the drama thin, and scored it 54. Yet of the three strands, it was the king at prayer that stayed with us afterwards, because a monarch on his knees over his own navy is an image about fear, and fear was the one thing in that film not played at full volume. A quieter film would have given him more to do with the idea. This one gave him candles.
He also directs, writes and paints, and has described painting as a necessary counterbalance to acting. Profiles of him tend to note, gently, that he has appeared in more films than strictly necessary, and the same coverage calls La buena estrella one of his strongest Spanish performances. That is where we would send a curious viewer first, with the caveat that we have not reviewed it ourselves. In the American films, watch his face in the moments when nobody else in the scene is looking at him. That is where the frightened man lives.
Biography
Jordi Mollà Perales is a Spanish actor, filmmaker, writer and artist from Catalonia. Born on 1 July 1968 in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat, he trained at the Institut del Teatre in Barcelona and studied further in Italy, Hungary and England. He began his career in Spanish cinema and television in the late 1980s and gained recognition with roles in films such as Jamón jamón (1992) and La Celestina (1996).
Mollà made his Hollywood debut as Diego Delgado in Blow (2001). He has appeared in numerous international productions including Bad Boys II (2003), Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Che: Part Two (2008) as Captain Mario Vargas, Knight and Day (2010), Colombiana (2011), Riddick (2013) and In the Heart of the Sea (2015). He has been nominated three times for the Goya Award for Best Actor and has also directed films and exhibited his artwork in galleries in Madrid and Barcelona.
