Tonatiuh, LGBTQ+ actor and child of Latino immigrants: ‘We need resilience to maintain our dignity, because they want to humiliate us’

Tonatiuh’s smile gives him away. As wide and sincere as it is, it betrays how tired he is. The 30-year-old Los Angeles actor is at the peak of his career, but getting to the top takes hard work and has left him a bit winded. In a conversation from his living room in Los Angeles, Tona (as his friends call him, a moniker shorter than his stage name and much shorter than his real name, Tonatiuh Elizarrarz) admits that he sometimes feels “out of sync,” overwhelmed by all the work he has done and continues to do, only to return to his normal life every night. As he sums it up, like a true representative of his generation, he lives “a bit like Hannah Montana,” living a double life.

It’s understandable that he’s worn out. In the last few months, he’s become a star player on the cinematographic panorama. With a career in shorts and series going back a decade, he’s now starring alongside none other than Diego Luna and Jennifer Lopez (who is also the producer) in the film Kiss of the Spider Woman, directed by Bill Condon. The hotly awaited project saw Tonatiuh step into the shoes of the prisoner Luis Molina, who, while incarcerated, lives in a dream world of 1940s fantasy and film. For the film’s production, the actor sang, danced and lost 44 pounds.

The Los Angeles resident is first-generation, born to Mexican parents. “I, as the son of immigrants, have always acted as the little lawyer, the little doctor and the translator,” he says. He has long helped his parents with their English, as so many descendants of migrants have. “And I have always felt a great disgust for injustice,” he continues.

When he was younger, he earned a scholarship to study law, but he now recognizes that he can’t see himself as a lawyer. “I would be unbearable,” he laughs. But he’ll never stop advocating for the causes that impact his life, and now that he has become a public figure, he’s doubled down on that commitment.

During an interview, he does not hesitate to speak out — and in impeccable Spanish — about the harshness with which his country treats migrants who have worked so hard for it, about deportation, and about the importance of keeping pride alive and raising one’s voice for one’s community.

He also shares that he was the last to be cast in this movie. He sent in his audition tape at the end of December, having learned to tango for it, and received word back that the producers were going to keep looking. He spent that night with his mother. They lit a candle, and asked God to help him renounce control, to flow (“I have a very obsessive mind,” he says). The next day, the movie’s team announced the role was his. The role of Luis Molina, a gay man who had been sent to jail over a public scandal during the Argentinian dictatorship, a character hailing from Manuel Puig’s novel, was now in his hands.

The actor has a lot in common with Molina, a man who doesn’t set out to break the mold, yet for whom stepping outside it is simply a way of life. “Since I was young, I never understood people’s obsession with telling others what they should like, or what they should do,” says Tonatiuh. “I was always really stubborn about it. I mean, if I wanted to play with dolls, or if I wanted to dance, to sing… I hated it when people told me it was bad for a little boy to do that. That point where you say to people, ‘Who are you to say that?’ — I’ve always had that. And in my youth, I always loved to transform and change myself, to play with different cultures, different friend groups, learn a different kind of music. I have an unbearable hunger for life,” he says, laughing.

He’s had that desire to create, play and transform ever since he saw his first musical, Wicked, at Los Angeles’s Pantages Theatre, with friends from school when he was 12 years old. “I very clearly remember seeing the wizard and saying, ‘He has such a beautiful life! I want to live those lives!’ Ever since, I’ve been obsessed with musicals, and I’ve always loved the power they have to transport you to a world through a song,” he says. That’s why having his first major project be a musical — and one brought to life with Condon, Lopez, and Luna — makes it all the more special. And that’s why he’s given it his all, taken classes, learned new skills, and slimmed down dramatically in just 50 days.

Despite having worked on dozens of projects during the last decade, like the series Vida, Hidden Canyons and The Loud House, it’s Kiss of the Spider Woman that has given Tonatiuh greater visibility, and a platform as well. The Latino community he knows is made up of “the most hard-working people,” who “live happily.” “What I love, more than anything, is that our film can remind people of that dignity, and that it is also a way of reminding Hollywood that Latinos have always been [part of it]. There’s no such thing as a Latin Hollywood.” he says.

As the son of Mexican immigrants, he is well aware of and concerned about what is happening in the United States, the frequent and indiscriminate deportation raids on Latinos. American by birth, he says he got his Mexican passport this year. “I always have it on me. Not because I feel like I need it, but to have it when I go places where there are privileged people who are not thinking about it, to remind them of it when they are interested in getting to know me. I don’t want them to erase what is happening to my people with the extraordinariness of what is happening to me, because right now, everyone wants to hold my hand and kiss me and give me compliments, but then I take out my passports and tell them, ‘I’m also one of those people.’”

The story of Molina and Kiss of the Spider Woman is also the story of the queer community, which Tonatiuh identifies with. Does he think it’s important to keep telling LGBTQ stories, even in the 21^st century? “Yes, definitely. What I love about both communities is that they come from a history that is profoundly full of resistance,” he reflects, speaking of Latinos and the LGBTQ community. “They both need that resilience, that tenacity. They need to dig in to maintain their dignity, to maintain their freedom, to fight, to remind people who we are. Because they want to humiliate us, they want to make us small,” he says.

Tonatiuh has been aware of this feeling since he was very young, as he recalls: “I remember as a child feeling a certain confusion, feeling ashamed of something, as if I had a secret. But I said, ‘Why? That’s my superpower!’ My identity is part of who I am. I’m not a politician, I’m an artist, and as an artist, it gives me so much joy to be able to share and create spaces of joy for these communities.”

Those aren’t empty words. Tonatiuh says that every summer, he returns to his old high school to teach acting to the students. Just a few days ago, he purchased a projection screen for the school, and invited them to watch the film “to say thanks.” “And they cried in my arms because they could never have imagined that something like that would be possible,” he says. “They know me and I know them. And it would be so ugly to forget where I come from, it seems so ridiculous… Because I have so much pride.”

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