Amid brightly colored stands selling spices, candies and imitation Labubus in all shades, the mono-monikered actor Tonatiuh sips on a hibiscus agua fresca at El Mercadito in Boyle Heights. The indoor market has been a staple of Latino life and commerce since it opened in the late 1960s.
Not far from here, his aunt still runs the business that she and Tonatiuh’s mother, an immigrant from the Mexican state of Guanajuato, opened decades ago. “My mom cut hair for a long time, so I grew up in a beauty salon,” he says, casually dressed in a light blue button-up shirt. “That’s why I talk so much.”
The school Tonatiuh attended as a kid, Our Lady of Lourdes, is also in the vicinity, as is the place where he learned to ride a bicycle, Hollenbeck Park. To say that the streets of Boyle Heights, where he was born, nurtured his worldview would be an understatement.
“These last few months have been really difficult,” Tonatiuh tells me, referencing the recent ICE raids that have ravaged the fabric of the city. He calls them vicious: a “PR cycle against people with dignity, taxpaying individuals who are feeding their families and running businesses, quite literally living the American dream, as cliché as that may sound. ”
Even as his own dreams are beginning to materialize, Tonatiuh, 30, remains tethered to these places and people. His career is about to launch into Hollywood’s firmament with a dual role in director Bill Condon’s screen adaptation of the stage musical version of “Kiss of the Spider Woman” (in theaters Oct. 10). The rising Mexican American actor shares dramatic space with superstars Jennifer Lopez and Diego Luna.
Reviews out of the Sundance Film Festival, where the movie debuted in January, praised Tonatiuh’s performance as a breakthrough. His electrifying turn is equal parts heart-wrenching, deliciously irreverent and technically impressive.
For the bulk of the film, Tonatiuh plays Luis Molina, a passionate gay prisoner in jail during Argentina’s 1970s-era Dirty War who is infatuated with the dazzling escapism of the movies — especially with the allure of fictional screen diva Ingrid Luna (a standout Lopez).
Molina indulges in fantasies to stay sane, a dreamscape we experience as scenes from a 1940s classic Hollywood musical. In them, Tonatiuh sings and dances as the dashing Kendall Nesbitt dressed to the nines in elegant tuxes. The musical portion of the film was shot in New York, while for the prison sequences only involving Tonatiuh and Diego Luna as Valentin, a rugged revolutionary, the production relocated to Uruguay. The effect, Tonaituh says, was like making two separate movies.
To perform alongside Lopez, he rehearsed with Broadway dancers for a month leading up to the shooting. “When I first met Jennifer, I was like, ‘Oh my God, that’s Jennifer Lopez, what the hell?’” he recalls with contagious energy. “I must have turned left on the wrong street because now I’m standing in front of her. How did this happen? What life am I living?”
One would think Tonatiuh’s mother knew he was destined to become a star when naming him after the brightest heavenly body.
“She had a dream when she was pregnant with me where she was in a field surrounded by golden orbs and they turned into the sun,” he explains. “And because of the Aztec mythology of Tonatiuh being the sun god, she woke up from the dream and was like, ‘My kid’s name is going to be Tonatiuh.’”
Growing up around Latinos, his Indigenous name didn’t raise eyebrows. But that changed once Tonatiuh got a taste of the demands of assimilation. “As we moved to West Covina, everyone tried to impose their anglicized identity onto me, and I went with it for many years,” he says. “Then I started realizing, ‘Why am I denying even my own name to fit in?’ It’s so stupid.”
The entertainment industry proved just as unwilling to accept all of him. Those advising him warned him to play ball. “It’s already hard enough given the way you look,” Tonatiuh recalls hearing from them. “I was just like, ‘Are we going to change my name to Albert?’”
As for his last name, Elizarraraz, he conceded it might be a bridge too far for English-only speakers. “My first name’s already difficult enough,” Tonatiuh says. “They are not ready for that.”
Increasingly, he found the concept of a mononym enticing. “I was like, ‘How many other Tonatiuhs are in the industry?’ I looked it up on SAG, and it was just me,” he says.
Enamored with drama from a young age, Tonatiuh remembers watching James Cameron’s “Titanic” on VHS as a formative experience. But it wasn’t until a friend’s mother invited him to see a live performance of “Wicked” when he was a teenager that acting grabbed him.
“I like stories with a hook and a bite to it,” he says. “‘Wicked’ is about segregation and the rise of it in America. But it’s in metaphor. ‘Animal Farm’ is the same way. There are beautiful, entertaining works that are also poignant, with messaging. That messaging is what’s most interesting to me.”
“My body is being used for a purpose much greater than just entertainment,” Tonatiuh says. “I didn’t have any nepotism. I was very fortunate that people believed in me, and they gave me opportunities.” (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
Despite his love of performing and storytelling, a more conventional path seemed likely. At the end of high school, Tonatiuh had been accepted to multiple universities to study political science.
“I have a very strong intolerance to injustice,” he says, a past victim of bullying and, like many children of immigrants, his mother’s de facto translator and legal avatar. “In my mind, I was like, I can help and be of most use if I became a lawyer or a politician.”
But thanks to an English teacher who suggested he should instead pursue his true passion, Tonatiuh doubled down on acting. His mother would drive him in traffic from West Covina to the South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa every morning before work so that he could have a chance at a proper acting education.
“I must have done something to earn her, because she’s such a loving person and her biggest thing was that she just wanted me to be happy,” he says of his devoted parent.
Formal training at USC followed, though Tonatiuh still felt uncertain on how to carve out space for himself, joining local L.A. theater companies while auditioning for TV and film roles.
“The hardest part of acting is the auditions, because it’s awkward,” he says. “Once you put the pieces in place, submitting to the story and using the words as your weapons to guide you through it, acting is just so fun.”
Read more: Q+A: KISS OF THE SPIDER WOMAN at L.A. Times Talks @ Sundance presented by Chase Sapphire Reserve
Showrunner Tanya Saracho became aware of Tonatiuh after seeing him in a play. She invited him to join the ensemble of “Vida,” a series filmed in his native Boyle Heights, in the role of Marcos, an academically accomplished queer man.
Sociopolitically outspoken material has shaped Tonatiuh’s resume so far: “Vida” dealt with gentrification, while the 2022 ABC series “Promised Land” followed undocumented characters who amassed power by way of wealth. Now, “Kiss of the Spider Woman” examines authoritarianism through a queer lens.
“My body is being used for a purpose much greater than just entertainment,” he says. “I didn’t have any nepotism. I was very fortunate that people believed in me, and they gave me opportunities.”
“Spider Woman” director Condon credits producer Ben Affleck with the liberty to cast someone talented but not yet a household name. “He said, ‘I know how important this is,’” Condon, an Oscar winner for 1998’s “Gods and Monsters,” recalls. “He took that off the table right away.”
The search for Condon’s Molina/Kendall was as extensive as the one he did for Effie in his film version of “Dreamgirls” 20 years earlier, the role that famously went to singer Jennifer Hudson.
“Hundreds of actors in South America, Central America, Mexico, Spain, New York, Los Angeles, London and other cities,” remembers Condon. “But it wasn’t like with all those hundreds there were dozens of credible choices. There were really just a handful.”
Among them, Tonatiuh grabbed attention on a self-taped audition. Condon sought someone who could be persuasive within the gritty realism of a prison movie, while also credibly being a larger-than-life Hollywood musical star. Tonatiuh inhabited both modes seamlessly.
“Tona has the most extraordinary, open, beautiful face,” says “Kiss of the Spider Woman” director Bill Condon. “But it’s the depth of feeling that he can convey that mattered most.” (Christina House / Los Angeles Times)
“Tona has the most extraordinary, open, beautiful face,” Condon says. “And his eyes just invite you in. There’s a lot of camp humor and that’s not something that comes naturally to someone of Tona’s generation, but he just has it in his bones. But it’s the depth of feeling that he can convey that mattered most.”
Tonatiuh seized the chance to play two distinctly complex characters within one movie. His task, he says, was injecting contemporary ideas about queerness into a period piece.
“When I got this one, it felt super special because I don’t think Hollywood always gives people like me an opportunity to play a character this dynamic,” Tonatiuh says. “There is such a return when Hollywood invests in Latin talent and treats us like normal people. Give us a good story. We’re not a genre.”
And though he and Condon discussed Molina’s mindset as well as the historical context and circumstances, Tonatiuh reveled in creative freedom because he wasn’t the focus of intense supervision.
“There was a certain level of mischief and magic that was happening because I was the least-known person on set,” he says. “And a lot of the eyes were on everyone else.” (That cover of anonymity might not last long.)
Throughout the production, Tonatiuh felt that “Kiss of the Spider Woman” spoke to his aspirations directly, not only to those of his characters. “There was this moment where Jennifer looked at me in the song ‘Where You Are,’ and sang, ‘Close your eyes and you’ll become a movie star. Why must you stay where you are?’ And in a weird way, it’s happening.”
Tonatiuh flew his mother and stepfather out to New York to witness “Where You Are,” an imposing musical number involving close to 70 people in front of the camera. When Lopez and Tonatiuh performed their dance duet, his mother was in awe.
“Now she wants to be Kris Jenner — she wants to be the momager,” Tonatiuh says, only half-joking. “In this time where Latinos are getting a lot of s—, it makes me really happy that I can bring her some pride.”
Yet, his mother hasn’t seen the finished film. He wants her to experience it at the upcoming premiere. “I want her to get the full experience of getting to walk the carpet,” he says.
His eyes wet, Tonatiuh recalls an emotional scene with Luna’s Valentin, Molina’s improbable love interest, that once again seemed to him as if film and his reality were in direct conversation.
“When I’m telling Valentin, ‘The film’s almost over and I don’t want it to end,’ it broke my heart because I realized that the film was actually almost over and I didn’t want it to end,” he says. “I bawled my eyes out as if I’d lost the love of my life, and that, for me as a person — what a gift, because it’s fake but it was real for me.”
Since wrapping “Kiss of the Spider Woman,” Tonatiuh has acted in Jeremy O. Harris’ play “Spirit of the People” and Ryan Murphy’s upcoming series “American Love Story.” For his next act, he wants to start from scratch.
“I want to do something completely different than Molina because I love being a shape-shifter,” he says. “I want to be unrecognizable every time I come on screen.”
This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
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