Antonio Banderas, the star of Puss in Boots and Desperado, first rose to mainstream fame in the U.S. with a pair of movies in which he played pulp hero Zorro. He played the role in 1998’s The Mask of Zorro and 2005’s The Legend of Zorro, appearing along costars Anthony Hopkins, Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Matt Letscher. All these years later, he has expressed some interest in playing the role one last time, perhaps handing the title of Zorro on to a new generation of actor. Apparently, those aren’t just conversations with the press, and there have actually been some pitches from Hollywood.
Videos by ComicBook.com
Without getting into any specifics, he admitted that he has been approached with “different ideas,” but that he’s pretty committed to the idea of playing a mentor figure not unlike what Hopkins did for him in The Mask of Zorro.
“I’ve had people approaching with different ideas. Obviously if I do another movie now, I would play the [mentor] character that Anthony Hopkins did in the first version, I [would] be the character that passes the torch to the new Zorro, which would be great, just to do so,” Banderas told Yahoo! Entertainment. “But you know, if it comes, great. If it doesn’t, you know, the other two are there forever.”
Banderas has previously said that Quentin Tarantino entertained the idea of a Zorro/Django crossover.
“He talked to me, I think on the Oscar night [in 2020] when I was nominated for Pain and Glory,” Banderas said. “We saw each other at one of those parties. He just came up to me and I was like, ‘In your hands? Yeah, man!’ Because Quentin just has that nature to do those type of movies and give them quality. Even if they are based on those types of B-movies of the ’60s and ’70s, he can take that material and do something really interesting. We’ve never worked together, but it would be great because of him, because of Jamie Foxx, and because of [playing] Zorro again when he’s a little bit older. It would be fantastic and funny and crazy.”
Last year, Banderas said that he wouldn’t mind passing the role of Zorro on to Tom Holland, an actor he particularly liked. There was some controversy that followed, as critics pointed out that would race-bend a prominent, explicitly Latino character.
While age might seem to be a complication for Banderas in a role like this, legacy sequels have proven that even action-oriented roles like Laurie Strode in Halloween and Indiana Jones can be continued and reinvented as the actors age.
