Antonio Banderas on Quentin Tarantino’s Django/Zorro Crossover Pitch

Antonio Banderas hasn’t been a stranger to tentpole franchises throughout his career but has recently leaned on more indie-related ventures. While promoting his film Official Competition, the actor, who has upcoming roles in the Shrek spinoff film franchise sequels Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and Indiana Jones 5, spoke to USA Today about a Zorro crossover pitch from director Quentin Tarantino that would see his incarnation of the character meet with the director’s Django, played by Jamie Foxx in 2012’s Django Unchained.

“I don’t know. If I do Zorro again, I would actually be the character played by Anthony Hopkins in the first one. (Laughs.) I’m gonna turn 62 this summer, so I don’t know if I can play that character in the same way I used to,” Banderas said. The actor first played the swashbuckling hero in 1998’s The Mask of Zorro for Sony and its 2005 sequel The Legend of Zorro. While Hopkins only appeared in the 1998 film, the film also starred Catherine Zeta-Jones. In the 2012 Tarantino film, Foxx’s Django is a former slave set free by bounty hunter King Schultz (Christoph Waltz) on the condition that he assists him on a bounty that ultimately leads him to Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) at a plantation.

Banderas recalled Tarantino’s pitch. “He talked to me, I think, on the Oscar night (in 2020) when I was nominated for ‘Pain and Glory.’ We saw each other at one of those parties. He just came up to me, and I was like, ‘In your hands? Yeah, man!’ Because Quentin just has that nature to do those type of movies and give them quality. Even if they are based on those types of B-movies of the ’60s and ’70s, he can take that material and do something really interesting. We’ve never worked together, but it would be great because of him, because of Jamie Foxx, and because of (playing) Zorro again when he’s a little bit older. It would be fantastic and funny and crazy.”

Several unrelated Zorro projects are in the works, including those from Sophia Vergara and Wilmer Valderrama. Banderas, who has never worked with Tarantino before, is a frequent collaborator with one of his best friends in, director Robert Rodriguez as the star of two films in the El Mariachi trilogy in, Desperado (1995) and Once Upon a Time in Mexico (2003) and also had supporting roles in Machete Kills and the Spy Kids franchise. For more on Banderas’ career, you can check out the whole interview here.