NYLON Magazine - September 2007 - (Page 156) LIFE IS A DREAM Slowly but surely Catalina Sandino Moreno is sinking ever deeper into the depths of a decrepit maroon couch by a window in a café on New York’s Upper East Side. It’s one of those establishments that is something of a local landmark—over at the counter an old lady is regaling the young barista with ludicrously detailed tales of her granddaughter’s swimming lessons and opposite us, at a small round table, a pair of affluent-looking thirty-somethings are discussing what kind of shower curtain they should opt for. Moreno seems quite at home amongst such domesticity—she has lived just around the corner for five years, after all, and as she surveys the scene, while picking out a crumpled sugar packet from under her tan corduroy shorts, a nostalgic smile flickers gently across her face. “You know, they’re closing this place down,” she says, her voice warm with a lilting Spanish inflection. She turns and fixes me with her huge coal-dark eyes, sucking slowly on the straw of her iced coffee and raising her eyebrows slightly. “Sad, isn’t it?” Even in silhouette—framed against the glaring brightness of the floor-to-ceiling windows, her black hair tucked neatly behind her ears, a thin shawl drawn loosely around her shoulders, her legs crossed and with gold gladiator sandals on her tiny feet—Moreno is exquisite, and it’s something that her directors to date have made the most of. A put-upon slaughterhouse worker (a role she played in Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation last year) is going to evoke sympathy enough, but when she’s as beautiful as Moreno, it’s more poignant still. Born in Bogotá, Colombia, Moreno first shot to international acclaim when Maria Full of Grace, in which she played the title role of a Colombian teenager who becomes a drug mule, started screening on the festival circuit in 2004. “It was totally surreal,” Moreno says of the experience, “I thought it was just going to end up on the HBO channel. I was so happy because we had HBO at home in Colombia. I was like ‘Mama, we’re going to be able to watch my movie on HBO!’ I never thought it was going to be in theaters, never thought it was going to be winning something.” At the premiere at Sundance that year, many of the audience were in tears, and then it went to the Berlin Film Festival. “We had packed all our bags and were going to leave after three days,” Moreno says, “and they told us ‘We think you should stay’ and I’m like ‘Hell no: I’m going to go back. Why should we stay?’ And they said ‘Well because you won Best Actress and Josh [Marston, the director] won Best Picture.’” Not long afterwards, Moreno was nominated for an Oscar—it was her first film. After the success of Maria, Moreno dropped out of theater school in Colombia to move to New York, and has been choosing her roles extremely carefully. In addition to Fast Food Nation, she starred in a segment of Paris, je t’aime and, this month, can be seen in Ethan Hawke’s adaptation of his own novel, The Hottest State. A candid, sometimes painfully honest film, The Hottest State depicts a quotidian relationship in New York—from the awkward Catalina Sandino Moreno is an actress known for the quality of her roles and, with leads in a Gabriel García Márquez adaptation and a two-part Steven Soderbergh opus on the horizon, that isn’t about to change. By Luke Crisell. Photographed by Ned Ambler bar introduction to the fumbling sex to the vacation and better sex to the heady talk of getting married and, eventually, the break-up. “I hate stories where the people break up but then at the end they’re together again and they love each other forever and ever and they have kids,” Moreno says. “It can happen, but a lot of times it doesn’t. I think this role is characteristically closer to myself than any other character I’ve done: She’s not a drug mule or a slaughterhouse worker, she’s just a girl that’s falling in love with a guy.” But as accomplished as Hawke’s film is, it is frankly nowhere near as exciting as two other projects Moreno has on the horizon, the first of which, due for release later this year, is the film adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez’s masterpiece, Love in the Time of Cholera. “When I heard that they were going to make that I was just so pissed off!” she says, throwing one of her arms in the air. (It reportedly took producer Scott Steindorff almost a decade to convince Marquez to sell the feature rights to the 1985 novel.) “It is just so beautiful that I couldn’t imagine how they could adapt it into a film. I’ve read it a thousand times, sometimes I just have to stop reading it because I can’t stop crying. I was just like ‘How can they make people feel the way that I am feeling when I read this with a film?’ But then I read the script, and it’s fantastic. And then when I found out they were shooting it in Colombia I was like ‘OK, before I really wanted to do it, now I need to do it.’”
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