In many ways, Cassandro takes the shape of a classic, inspirational sports biopic. The film, now streaming on Prime Video, follows an outsider who finds meaning in a particular competitive realm, tracing his most unlikely rise to stardom. It’s a description you could apply to dozens of Hollywood hits—a fact that the movie’s director, Roger Ross Williams, is keenly aware of. Those conventional bones give shape to the kind of story that, in reality, the industry rarely takes seriously—in this case, that of a gay Mexican American wrestler who defies the odds to triumph in his ultramasculine environment.
So goes the story of real-life lucha libre icon Saúl Armendáriz, which was previously tackled by Williams in the nonfiction short The Man Without a Mask. Here, Williams, whose lauded work in documentary has earned him both an Academy Award (Music by Prudence) and an Emmy Award (The Apollo), makes his narrative debut by reexamining a subject he already knows intimately. It’s why the film brims with confidence, from the casting of Gael García Bernal—an actor Williams pursued for years—to the focus on self-acceptance and familial estrangement, topics true to both Armendáriz’s and Williams’s actual lives. It’s why Cassandro feels quietly radical in its portrait—especially in the exuberant, soaring performance from Bernal, who’s receiving the kind of showcase he’s deserved for a long time.
That goes somewhat for Williams too. Cassandro (watch an exclusive clip above) arrives smack in the middle of a true breakthrough year for the director, if such a term can apply to someone who’s already got a healthy trophy shelf going. His work on the Hulu docuseries The 1619 Project has him currently up for another Emmy, while his Oscar-contending new Netflix doc, Stamped From the Beginning, just premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival—and his docuseries The Super Models just hit Apple TV+. “Cassandro was seven years in the making, and Stamped was three years; Super Models, a couple years,” Williams told me over coffee in Telluride a few weeks ago, where Cassandro screened. “And it’s all just kind of coming together within a couple of weeks now. Kind of crazy.”
Vanity Fair: This movie really lives on Gael’s performance. You’ve talked about how aggressively you pursued him for this movie, but how did you find him as a collaborator?
Roger Ross Williams: Gael really dug into the physicality of it and did mostly all of his own stunts. He really learned to wrestle. He also started training six months to a year before. He started pretty extensive bulking up and working out, but he really learned to be a wrestler. He embraced that part of it. He made an emotional connection to the material, because we talked a lot about how it’s about tapping into his own relationship to his own father. Working with Gael, it was really a lot about just talking. Just breaking down and analyzing the character and the emotional arc of the journey of the character. He’s very much an intellectual—and it was COVID, so we had a lot of long Zoom conversations. By the time he had gotten to set, we had worked that out. He was ready. So it was about executing the physicality of it. Spending hours and hours and hours being pummeled in the ring every day.
I imagine that was true for you too. Moving into narrative filmmaking, I thought about those wrestling matches and the world of lucha libre as a place where you get to explore a different kind of filmmaking. How did you want to capture that world? What kind of research did you do?
David Canfield
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