Entertainment

Ten-year-old Stella Banderas isn't impressed by her Papi's reputation as a sexy, smolderingly handsome movie and Broadway star.

"But she's kind of proud when she goes to school and the kids say, 'Isn't your daddy Puss in Boots?' " Antonio Banderas, 46, says with a laugh. He spoke about the role during a phone interview from Los Angeles, where he was promoting Shrek the Third, which opens Friday.

DreamWorks

Antonio Banderas reprises his role as Puss in Boots in Shrek the Third, which opens Friday.

Even so, he says, he did not make his animated debut three years ago with Shrek 2 to please Stella or her half siblings, Alexander and Dakota, the older children of Mr. Banderas' wife, Melanie Griffith.

"Breaking the rules is what I am really proud of," he says. "With most kids' movies, they have a specific pattern. With Shrek, the pattern is broken. It has an interesting reflection about diversity. It shows respect for people who are different from you."

Mr. Banderas particularly likes the sparring and the grudging respect between his Puss and Eddie Murphy's Donkey, a relationship that takes on an intriguing twist in the new film as Shrek tries to find someone to take his place as the newly appointed king.

Making fun of his own image was a plus, too, says Mr. Banderas, who helped develop the character as a parody of his swashbuckling role in The Mask of Zorro.

"I think laughing at yourself is very healthy," he says. "Humor is a quality of intelligence and spirit. It is a very important side of anyone who is in a relationship with me. I don't have friends without a sense of humor."

He did the Spy Kids films, too, because he liked the way they "make fun of James Bond." Again, he says, he wasn't looking to do a kids' movie; he was just open to doing any movie with San Antonio filmmaker Robert Rodriguez.

"I love Robert Rodriguez," Mr. Banderas says. "He's my buddy. When he calls me up to do a film, I will do a film with him. It's just coincidence that Shrek came back to back with Spy Kids."

It's difficult to think of an actor with a career that's harder to pin down. He segues from art films to big-budget studio movies to animation to Broadway musicals, playing everything from Tom Hanks' gay lover in Philadelphia to Che opposite Madonna in Evita. And that's the way Mr. Banderas likes it.

"I don't believe in a career," he says. "A career is something that can contrive you to do certain things in order to preserve the image people have of you, and you have to feed it continuously. It's boring. I like change. I like to be able to jump from genre to genre. For me, to act is all about the capacity of changing and becoming different people in different situations, with different stories told in a different style."

Actually, if there has been any pattern to Mr. Banderas' art, it's been about change and defying expectations. Born in Malaga, Spain, he was once arrested by that country's repressive government for performing in a Bertolt Brecht play at the University of Malaga and brought to the station where his father was a policeman.

Mr. Banderas says his schoolteacher mother still tells him, "'You should have stayed here, working in a bank.' She always wanted me to be very normal."

Normal, evidently, has not been his goal. But he seems pretty happy with his wild, somewhat unpredictable American ride. Now married to Ms. Griffith for 11 years (a relationship few thought would last), he appreciates the journey that took him from being a non-English-speaking outsider who had to learn his part in 1992's The Mambo Kings phonetically to getting cast for his voice – not his looks! – in the Shrek movies.

His Puss in Boots character may even get spun off into its own movie, with a tentative release date of 2010 – and Mr. Banderas can't wait.

"It seems it's going to be done in between the fourth and the fifth Shrek movie. I would love to do that, a movie for the cat."

And Stella's looking forward to that, too.