Ok, sure, you’ve got a few folks who whined about Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, and they are likely the same people who got excited watching Kid Rock and Robert Kennedy do their geriatric workout. The fact is that Bad Bunny is one of the most popular artists in the world and his show still has fans and non-fans buzzing about Puerto Rican culture like never before. It’s the perfect time to announce his first lead actor role in Porto Rico, a film that is steeped in Puerto Rican history.
Deadline reports Benito “Bad Bunny” Martínez Ocasio will star in Porto Rico, a love letter to Puerto Rico that will mark the directorial debut of 34-time Grammy and Latin Grammy Award-winning rapper/activist René “Residente” Pérez Joglar. Residente recently wowed audiences (including me) with his performance in the award-winning Sundance drama In the Summers.
Joining Bad Bunny in the cast are Viggo Mortensen, Edward Norton, and Javier Bardem. Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu is an executive producer on the film, co-written by his Birdman writer Alexander Dinelaris.
Described as “an epic Caribbean western and historical drama”, Porto Rico was originally intended as a look at “Puerto Rican revolutionary José Maldonado Román, known as Águila Blanca (White Eagle), set on the island in the late 19th century. Maldonado Román fought against colonialism by leading a gang of ex-convicts to vindicate Puerto Rico as it sought its identity as a country.” It’s unclear whether that remains the project’s direction.
Residente said, “I have dreamed of making a film about my country since I was a child. Puerto Rico’s true history has always been surrounded by controversy. This film is a reaffirmation of who we are — told with the intensity and honesty that our history deserves.”
Norton, also a producer on the project, compared it to classic American crime movies… “This film sits in a tradition of films we deeply love, from The Godfather to Gangs of New York, that both thrill us with visceral drama and iconic characters and eras while also forcing us to face up to the shadow story under the American narrative of idealism. Everybody knows what a poet of language and rhythm René is. Now they’re going to see what a visual visionary he is as well. And bringing him and Bad Bunny together to tell the true story of Puerto Rico’s roots is going to be like a flame finding the stick of dynamite that’s been waiting for it.”
For Bad Bunny, this is a huge step up as an actor. His biggest roles to date have been supporting ones, in David Leitch’s action flick Bullet Train, and a strong performance opposite Gael Garcia Bernal in lucha libre drama Cassandro. At one point, he was going to star in a Spider-Man spinoff movie, but that fell through.
