The end of the road has come for Antionio Banderas’s Desperado series. The actor played a nameless mariachi who drifted through a trilogy of Western-style action films from filmmaker Robert Rodriguez between 1993 and 2003. First appearing in El Mariachi, the character’s best-known appearance was in Desperado, which was followed by Once Upon a Time in Mexico, in which the character took something of a backseat to Johnny Depp and Salma Hayek. While some reviews criticized this, Rodriguez would claim that it was intentional, as an homage to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the third film in which Clint Eastwood played The Man With No Name.
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Banderas became a huge star in the years following the release of Desperado, and by the time Once Upon a Time in Mexico rolled around, it was considered a coup to get three stars of that magnitude together for a low-budget affair like one of Rodriguez’s “Mexico Trilogy” films. The series would get that official branding with a box-set release in 2010, and there have been rumors since that the character might return in a movie or TV series, but if that happens, at least Banderas is unlikely to be part of it.
“I don’t know if I would do another Desperado,” Banderas told an interviewer with the Associated Press after gushing about his admiration for Hayek, whom he met on the film. “I don’t know if I’m just too old for Desperado.”
It’s an understandable position — after all, he is 59 ears old, and the character demanded a lot from him physically in those three films. On the other hand, you can compare his age to guys like Clint Eastwood (who did Unforgiven in his early ’60s), Sylvester Stallone (still Rambo after all these years at 73), and of course Arnold Schwarzenegger, who was just recently a Terminator at 72.
On top of what he already said, though, Banderas’s story is a little different than those others because it was a fairly well-received trilogy of films, but it didn’t make a crazy amount of money. And Hollywood loves trilogies almost (but not quite) as much as they love movies with $100 million-plus potential.
Banderas can next be seen in Robert Downey, Jr.’s Dolittle, which will be released later this year. 2020 will also see him star as the title lead in a biopic about Ferruccio Lamborghini, as well as appearing in The New Mutants and The Hitman’s Wife’s Bodyguard, according to his IMDb page.
