Movies: MEET THE NEW IT BOY

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"A film movement cannot develop solely on the efforts of directors," Salles says. "Italy had great directors like Visconti and Fellini but also actors like Marcello Mastroianni and Giulietta Masina. Now in Latin America you have Alejandro González Iñárritu [Amores Perros] and Alfonso Cuarón [Y Tu Mamá También] but also a generation of young, talented actors such as Gael." García Bernal realizes his good fortune: "Destiny and luck have given me and many other actors the chance to be in a certain position where no one else has been."

In 2001 Bardem's performance in Before Night Falls made him the first Spaniard nominated for a Best Actor Oscar. This year there could be two nominees from Spanish-speaking countries: Bardem as a paraplegic who persistently petitions for euthanasia in Alejandro Amenábar's The Sea Inside and García Bernal in ... take your pick.

The son of theater actors, young Gael was often picked for roles in their productions--"playing around," he calls it. "I knew I was supposed to act," he says, "but not as a professional." An improbable chain reaction triggered his career. At 17, he was studying philosophy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico when a strike was called. He decided to take a trip. The cheapest European tickets were to London, so he went there, got a job as a barman and began studying acting at the Central School of Speech and Drama. Before he graduated in 2001, he took time off to shoot Amores Perros and Y Tu Mamá También.

García Bernal attacks each role with ardor and exhaustive research. Preparing to play the young Guevara, he says, "for four months we were reading all the biographies, meeting people that met him, interviewing his family, studying leprosy, studying the economic and political cultures of Argentina and Peru. I went to visit where he was born, to get the blessings of the gods."

In tracing the journey of Guevara from restless child of the upper middle class to abettor of the Cuban revolution, the movie runs into dead ends of sentiment (the little people Che bonds with include a gorgeous leper) and nearly sinks in bathos (he swims a wide river for one last visit to the leper colony). It's all to demonstrate the radicalizing of a guerrilla hero. "We wanted to show where Che came from and where he was going," García Bernal says. "So finding the tone was very delicate, like fine embroidery." Certainly his participation is faultless. He brings to the role a winsomeness and dawning wisdom. Before your eyes, a boy grows into an angry young man.

García Bernal has that boyish quality; even when he dresses up for a film premiere, he looks like a kid in Dad's duds. The child behind the man--that's a theme in Bad Education, in which the main character is a homosexual plotting revenge for his childhood abuse by a priest. The actor playing that character must juggle many identities, and Almodóvar saw that ability in García Bernal: "The script demanded someone who would be absolutely desirable both as a woman and as a man, who would be spontaneously virile and not be grotesque when the role was that of a transvestite. From the first tests, Gael was the one who was physically successful in both roles."