MACHO LIBRE

The ultimate underdog tale, Cassandro tells the story of the real-life Mexican wrestler who both dominated the ring and changed attitudes towards homosexuality. Total Film meets director Roger Ross Williams and star Gael García Bernal to pay homage to one of the Spanish-speaking world's most iconic athletes.

- JAMES MOTTRAM

Sometimes, a filmmaker just knows when a subject is right. For Roger Ross Williams it was the day he first encountered the Mexican wrestler Saúl Armendáriz, better known by his ring name, Cassandro. ‘I fell in love with Cassandro the minute I met him,’ recalls Williams, when Total Film hooks up with him over video chat.

At the time, Williams was filming footage for The Man Without a Mask, a 2016 non-fiction short for The New Yorker, inspired by William Finnegan’s portrait of Cassandro that appeared in the magazine two years earlier. ‘Actually, the first day shooting with Cassandro… I went out that night with my crew, we were at a tequila bar. I remember that moment. And I said, “This is going to be my first scripted film.”’

In the unique, colourful but very macho world of lucha libre wrestling, Cassandro was a revolution. In the ring, the openly gay Armendáriz was a self-styled exótico – a breed of wrestler known for their extravagant, outlandish style. In the late 1980s, Cassandro’s popularity helped the LGBTQ+ community become more widely accepted in Mexico.

If anything brought home Cassandro’s status to Williams, it was walking with him around the streets of Juárez, the notoriously violent, drug cartel-run town on the US-Mexico border where his family hail from. ‘People are coming up and hugging him and he’s kissing babies,’ Williams recalls. ‘We get to the arena, and we go backstage and [in] this world of very macho wrestlers, these men are embracing him. And they’re treating him like one of the guys. And I was like, “Wait a minute, how is this happening?” I was just confused by it all.’