The Expendables 3: Antonio Banderas and Wesley Snipes on Joining the Gang

This past weekend, ComingSoon.net flew to London to chat with the cast of The Expendables 3 and attend the premiere. Antonio Banderas and Wesley Snipes are newcomers to the franchise and absolutely stand out as some of the best characters in the film. Snipes even has a line that makes fun of his recent legal troubles. Banderas and Snipes sat down to chat about their roles, their approach to acting, working with a cast of luminaries like this and where their inspiration comes from.

Q: Both of you guys have been involved in so many movies, what did you think the process for making this movie was going to be before you got in there and what was it actually like compared to what you thought?

Antonio Banderas: At the beginning, you know, to tell you the truth, when you go to a movie with so many stars, you don’t know what you’re going to find, exactly. You don’t know if it’s going to be an ego trip, ego on the set [laughs], who is taking this position, where the camera is, I want to be in front of this guy – that’s true. In fact, I think everybody was joking about that possibility on the set. It’s worse, actually, when you have people around you that are very hungry to obtain something that they never had. Success. And these guys are so successful, not just with movies. With franchises and everything they have done. They’ve overcome, actually these tons of stars, to become legends, and that’s what they are. So they are not hungry. It was a sense of fun. That’s the truth. That’s what I experienced. [To Snipes] I don’t know in your case.

Wesley Snipes: I was just hoping that it wasn’t just about jumping and gunning and shooting and blasting stuff up. That we would be given the opportunity to create a character, not just come and play ourselves – a version of ourselves and get to play off one another. That repartee, like, you know, theater actors do. I was looking forward to that. And sure enough, that’s the way it turned out. We had a latitude to play and experiment and call and response, as we say, and build the character and give some nuances and bring some subtleties that actors like to do to characters.

Banderas: He’s very serious on the set. No, this is not a joke.

Snipes: I’m not – I don’t smile at all.

Banderas: No, he doesn’t. This thing [indicates Snipes’ deadpan face] not at all…

Snipes: Every time he’d come out at my trailer [laughter], I’d [deadpan face]…

Banderas: He though it was like – when we finished the shooting at the end of the day, but he’s not like that. I went to knock in there, but there was nobody there. I [said], “knock knock, Wesley, are you there?”

Snipes: [deadpan face] Go away.

Banderas: Wesley?

Snipes: Go away.

Banderas: He was completely in his character.

 You can continue reading the full interview over at ComingSoon.net!
 

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