Antonio Banderas recently hinted he would be open to reprising his role as Zorro in a crossover with Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained.
In an interview with USA Today, Banderas was asked if he had ever spoken to Tarantino about appearing in the adaptation to the sequel crossover comic. "He talked to me, I think on the Oscar night (in 2020) when I was nominated for Pain and Glory," the actor said. "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."
Published in 2014 and 2015, Django/Zorro was a comic miniseries written by Tarantino and Matt Wagner and drawn by Esteve Polls. The story acted as an official sequel to Tarantino's 2012 Western Django Unchained and saw gunslinger Django Freeman hired as a bodyguard to Don Diego de la Vega, better known as the masked vigilante Zorro. Together, the two fight against a corrupt landowner using Indigenous people as slave labor. In 2019, it was reported that Tarantino was developing a feature adaptation of Django/Zorro with Jerrod Carmichael co-writing the screenplay.
Banderas previously starred in 1998's The Mask of Zorro and its 2005 sequel, The Legend of Zorro, as Alejandro Murrieta, an outlaw who takes up the mantle of Zorro from an aging Don Diego, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins. When asked if he would ever play the swashbuckling hero again, Banderas said "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."
Currently, there are two other Zorro projects in development. The first is a "reimagining" of the 1957 Disney TV series with Wilmer Valderrama executive producing and starring as Don Diego, set to air on Disney+. The other, written by frequent Tarantino collaborator Robert Rodriguez and his sister Rebecca, will be set in the present day and follow "a young Latinx woman seeking vengeance for her father’s murder" who "joins a secret society and adopts the outlaw persona of Zorro." It was originally developed for NBC but has since moved to The CW.
The Mask of Zorro is available to stream on Tubi. Django Unchained is available to stream on Netflix.
Source: USA Today