Antonio Banderas reveals why he fled Hollywood after major health scare

Antonio Banderas gave up his ritzy Hollywood lifestyle and has zero regrets almost 10 years later. The actor, 65, moved back to his home town — Málaga, Spain — back in 2017. Banderas said it was his near-fatal heart attack that triggered his big move. “Mine was a really serious warning,” he said of the heart attack in an interview with the Times published Wednesday.

“It changed the way I look at life.” The outlet noted that prior to his major health scare, Banderas was living between the US and the UK, and had a mansion in Cobham, Surrey. The “Desperado” star then immediately quit smoking, sold his private jet, returned to Málaga and bought a theatre.

“Faced with death, it made me look back and realize that I am, in fact, a theatre actor,” he explained. Banderas now lives in a flat with his longtime girlfriend, Nicole Kimpel, and owns multiple restaurants. But his not-for-profit theatre, Teatro del Soho, is his greatest passion.

Banderas also reflected on how he became a superstar in Hollywood, sharing that his insecurities about English not being his first language went away after he married his now ex-wife, Melanie Griffith . The two divorced in 2015 after 18 years of marriage.

He shared that while he was originally told that as a Spaniard, he could only play “the bad guys” in films, he proved them wrong with 1998’s “The Mask of Zorro.” “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.

He continued, “Even more important is [his 2011 film] ‘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.” Banderas spoke to Page Six in December 2022, and said his heart attack was “one of the best things” that ever happened to him.

“I realized that it probably was one of the best things that ever happened in my life because the things that were not important and I was worried every day about them, meaningless,” he explained. He told us that after his near-death experience, he began to detach from “things that I thought were important before but weren’t really.” “I was like, why am I worried about that if I’m going to die?” he recalled.

“I knew always [that I was going to die], but now I know. I’ve seen it right here.”