Antonio Banderas is opening up about the many ways he believes his near-fatal heart attack changed his life for the better.

In a wide-ranging interview with the U.K. publication The Times, the five-time Golden Globe nominee says he’s “never been so happy” nine years after returning to his native Spain following his health scare. Prior to that, he’d been splitting his time between the U.S. and the U.K. in order to focus on film.

“Mine was a really serious warning. It changed the way I look at life,” he said of his 2017 heart attack. Upon recovery, Banderas said, he quit smoking, sold his private jet and returned to his hometown, Malaga, where he now lives with his girlfriend, Nicole Kimpel, and owns a theater, the Teatro del Soho CaixaBank.

“Faced with death, it made me look back and realize that I am, in fact, a theater actor,” he added.

Banderas, now 65, previously addressed how his health prompted him to reprioritize his life in a 2022 interview with the New York Post’s Page Six.

“I knew always [that I was going to die], but now I know. I’ve seen it right here,” he said at the time, noting he’d undergone a procedure to insert three stents into his arteries after his heart attack.

These days, Banderas hasn’t turned his back on the big screen entirely. In 2024, he appeared in the steamy thriller “Babygirl” with Nicole Kidman.

Last year, it was announced he’d joined the cast of the forthcoming Anthony Bourdain biopic “Tony,” portraying a Brazilian restaurateur who serves as a young Bourdain’s mentor.

The bulk of Banderas’ time, however, is spent directing and producing plays and musicals at the Teatro del Soho CaixaBank. In April, the theater is set to host Malaga’s first international dance festival, Tiptoe.

Banderas had already starred in several of Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s films before he relocated to the U.S. in the early 1990s. It wasn’t long before he catapulted to global fame with a string of blockbusters, including “Desperado” and “The Mask of Zorro.”

In his chat with The Times, he said he’d initially been told by American filmmakers he could only “play the bad guys,” as much of Hollywood was “off limits to Spaniards” at the time.

“The problem was a few years later I had a mask, hat, sword and cape and the bad guy was Captain Love, who was blond and had blue eyes,” he said. “Even more important is ‘Puss in Boots,’ because it’s for young kids. They see a cat that has a Spanish, even an Andalusian accent and he’s a good guy.”

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