(Re-posted from LimitéMagazine.com)

April 2, 2012

Committed to its mission to seek and promote tomorrow’s trending topics, Limité Magazine is thrilled to announce its fourth-annual “Faces to Watch” list. The feature focuses on select up-and-coming personalities in various facets of culture and lifestyle. After much consideration, 10 names were chosen for this year’s list. They were selected based on their potential to make a significant impact on their disciplines—in short, these are the names we’ll be talking about tomorrow.

Demián Bichir

by Morgan Goldin

When the 2012 Academy Award nominees for Best Actor were being announced, one nomination came as a surprise to audiences and industry insiders alike. Alongside uber-famous Hollywood actors George Clooney and Brad Pitt, there was Jean Dujardin (who eventually won the category), unknown to most Americans but recognized for his work in the popular The Artist, and Demián Bichir, for his role in A Better Life. Bichir’s sensitive and soulful portrayal of an undocumented migrant worker was powerful enough to make the Academy take notice, despite the indie feature going largely unseen by moviegoers. However, to Hispanic audiences, this was an actor finally getting his due.

Bichir was born in Mexico City on August 1, 1963. He started his acting career in telenovelas, with productions filmed in Mexico, the United States, and Spain. He took a break from his television acting to focus on a movie career. His movie Sexo, pudor y lagrimas (1999) was a massive box office smash, breaking all kinds of records to win the accolade of being the number one film in all of Mexican cinema. His role earned him an Ariel, a Mexican version of the Academy Award. The film In the Time of Butterflies (2001) was Bichir’s American debut, in which he co-starred with Salma Hayek. He garnered other roles in American film and television productions, playing a major role as Esteban Reyes on the hit Showtime show Weeds, as well as portraying Fidel Castro for Steven Soderbergh’s Che (2008). However, with his role as Carlos Galindo in A Better Life, Bichir, only the second Mexican actor to be nominated for a Best Actor Oscar (after Anthony Quinn), will hopefully be a name that more American audiences recognize. And here’s a fun fact: he was the singing voice of Aladdin in the Spanish dub version of the 1992 Disney classic.

Bichir can next be seen in Oliver Stone’s 2012 release Savages, which also stars John Travolta, Blake Lively, Uma Thurman, Benicio Del Toro, and his Butterflies co-star Salma Hayek.

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