Rodrigo Santoro Talks 'Heleno,' Playing A Mad Man, '300' Sequel

Not well at all. I just knew that he was a great player and a little troubled. That’s what I heard. That’s actually the reason that we decided to do this film, because I found out his importance in soccer history for Brazil, and he was kind of like this character lost in time. The director brought me the project, I mean we didn’t have a script at the time, but he just said, ‘Well there’s a book of this guy, there are some pictures here, the story’s amazing. I think it’s a very good role for you to play.’ And we started to research, we started to interview people all over the place, people that saw him playing or knew stories about him, and we did that for over a year and I was fascinated by everything I was hearing. It was incredible. I was totally blown away by the stories and by his journey, his life’s story.

It’s hard to describe. What I tried to do was try to understand what was sitting at the bottom of it. Because I heard a lot of stories of all the things that he did and all the wild things that he did and his behavior. I think my mission as an actor was to try to bring humanity to it and understand what was going on inside him and his conflict and his views. I think there’s a lot of intensity throughout; any way that he expressed himself was always very intense, like radical intensity, we could say obsessive at times. What I just tried to do was to be in that zone, to understand him. We worked very freely. I had a friendship with the director before and we wanted to work together and this project brought us together. We had a lot of freedom working. We were trying things, we were really trying to understand and study this character as we were shooting. We were really trying to bring not only a realistic feeling to it, but also trying to find his humanity, trying not to judge him or put him in a dark light or a bright light. It was very, very interesting, creative process.

You learn about the character while you’re doing it, and I was trying to understand, ‘What was the sweet side of him? Where was the love?’ I think he had a deep love and passion for the sport of soccer, that was his main thing in life. He loved it, a wealthy man, a lawyer, and he just left everything behind because he wanted to play soccer. And I was just trying to see what was the lighter side of this guy. And I went to his hometown in Brazil where he was born and raised until he was a teenager before he moved to Rio de Janeiro, and I talked to people around and I heard stories. I met this guy who was like a 92-year old, he was a goalkeeper and he played with Heleno for fun back then and he told me little stories. The stories just gave me a different take on the character, a fresh take after hearing all those [other] stories, sort of like this boy trying to be accepted, this boy looking for some warmth. The way he told me the stories and the way he described Heleno’s behavior when he was a teenager gave me a lot of insight about maybe where the whole thing was coming from. I think that’s a beautiful side in him, which was tragic because he lost control, not only to disease, but his ego and everything took over. But I think he was just trying to be accepted. The way he did it got him into a lot of trouble. He was really probably not one of the most lovable or appropriate people, but he was definitely coming from a place of trying to be accepted, trying to be loved and really trying to be the best as he could. It’s a level that I think took him so far that he lost it, but he was trying to really live fully and really trying to be the best as he could. And he wanted people to be like him.

Challenge. I think after the research I had the feeling that he was driven by challenge, he liked to be challenged; he liked to be challenged by the audience, the crowd, the stadium. He was known as Gilda, played by Rita Hayworth at that time. That was one of his nicknames because Gilda was a very temperamental character and Heleno was known to be like that and the crowd would scream at the staduim, “Gilda! Gilda!” And he would respond to the crowd; he would comment and talk and scream and leave the field. He did all kinds of stuff. He was very passionate and he was also a performer.

No, not that I know of because in Lost you never know. I have two projects, Heleno is opening Friday in Miami, New York and L.A. And hopefully we stay a little while in the theaters so people will have a chance to watch it. And then in January there’s a movie called Last Stand with Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker and Luis Guzman, that’s a big chunk of good actors and I think that comes out Jan. 18. And then there’s another 300 [300: Rise of an Empire]. We just wrapped in September and that’s coming out next year, I think in August. I’m playing the same character [Xerxes], revisiting the character after six years, which was a real, real challenge. It was very, very interesting. I think technology has developed since then, even more, and it was looking fantastic from the pieces that I saw. It’s a new director, his name is Noam Murro, but Zach Snyder still wrote and is producing it and is very close [to the project]. I think people can expect a real good movie.