Meet Gotham City Mayor Nestor Carbonell

July 23, 2008
By Virginia Alvarado

If, as John Leguizamo famously joked, there are no Latinos in “Star Trek” because America doesn’t plan to have Hispanics around for the future, at least there’s still Gotham City.

In Batman’s latest installment, the record-breaking blockbuster “The Dark Knight,” Cuban-American actor Nestor Carbonell plays a very Latin Mayor Robert Garcia.

“It’s such a great honor to be part of this cast and to play Gotham City’s mayor,” said Carbonell, 40, who was born in New York City.

“He’s a little tough, maybe cynical, and on occasion even arrogant,” says Carbonell of his gloomy character. “As an actor, that helped me to work on different facets.”

Mayor Garcia, he adds, “is a man who was very idealistic and principled at the beginning of his career. But then he saw that things in the city didn’t work the way he thought, and that he needed to compromise with the different groups fighting in the city.”

“The Dark Knight,” directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Christian Bale and the late Heath Ledger, has taken in $155.34 million to top “Spider-Man 3” for best opening weekend ever at the box office.

Carbonell lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Australian actress Shannon Kenny, and their two kids.

He says he never intended to be an actor when he grew up, but it all started when he took a drama class while he was studying English literature at Harvard, in 1989.

“It was almost by accident,” he says. The next year, he made his Off-Broadway debut in “A Silent Thunder,” by playwright Eduardo Iván López.

Since then, he’s appeared in dozens of movies and TV shows, such as the sexy photographer Luis Rivera in “Suddenly Susan.”

But he is probably best known for his “Lost” character Richard Alpert, a mysterious man who never ages.

Carbonell was recently in Hawaii and shot several episodes for the ABC series’ fifth season, to be aired next fall. He will also participate in the movie “Killing Pablo,” about notorious Colombian drug dealer Pablo Escobar.

His favorite moment of “The Dark Knight” shooting — which took place in Chicago — was a scene with 1,200 extras.

“I had to make a speech,” he says, “and when I saw myself standing in front of such a big crowd, I felt that maybe in another life I would like to be a politician. I imagined what it would be like to be a real mayor, to run a big city.”

Source: NY Daily News