Sex, Love and War: How the Racy Gay Epic ‘La Bola Negra’ Could Win Netflix’s First Best Picture Oscar

For Guitarricadelafuente and Miguel Bernardeau, the romance that fuels “La Bola Negra” wasn’t the challenge.

“It wasn’t hard to fall in love with him,” Bernardeau says, looking at his co-star. The two men, both 29-year-old Spaniards, haven’t tired of one another yet, despite a global tour that began in Cannes this spring and has now brought them to New York. “It was hard to create war.”

Those two forces, love and war, coexist painfully in what may be the most ambitious film of this year’s Oscar season. Directed by Javier Calvo and Javier Ambrossi, the two-man team known as Los Javis, “La Bola Negra” depicts the lives of multiple gay men in Spain over three separate timelines: In 1932, young Carlos (Milo Quifes) is blackballed — hence the film’s title — from a social club over his sexuality. In 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, Guitarricadelafuente and Bernardeau play, respectively, a soldier and the prisoner of war he must guard, as their affections blossom inexplicably across political lines. And in 2017, historian Alberto (Carlos González) struggles to figure out how the two preceding tales intersect, stumped until an academic (Glenn Close in a brief, striking cameo) steps in to help.

The story of Spain’s rupture and its fall into repressive dictatorship wasn’t news to the actors. “It’s something that has touched everybody — our great-grandparents were all involved,” Guitarricadelafuente says. “It’s common in our DNA in Spanish society.” But to make the history feel real and immediate, they had to learn how to behave like soldiers. “We received military preparation — how to hold a rifle,” says Guitarricadelafuente, who has a gentle, soft-spoken bearing both in person and onscreen. His Sebastián would rather be playing his trumpet — he fights only reluctantly; he’s more at home in his feelings than in combat. “There’s a naiveness to him,” he continues, “but he’s not stupid. Playing the trumpet is what makes him have hope in the future — one day, he’ll be able to go to Madrid and be a musician.” Indeed, an encounter with a vivacious lounge singer, played by Penélope Cruz, convinces Sebastián that the world is broader than he ever suspected, in a dazzling scene at the heart of the movie.

At least one stakeholder in “La Bola Negra” wanted to be sure Guitarricadelafuente could be credible as a fighter as well as a lover: Meeting him for the first time, Pedro Almodóvar, one of the movie’s producers, asked whether the singer had any edge at all.

Guitarricadelafuente relates Almodóvar’s question first in Spanish before translating it: “Is he gonna avoid just being, like … nice?”

He’s going to need some armor as he gears up for awards season. After it blew up a sleepy Cannes earlier this year, earning a 20-minute standing ovation, winning a shared best director prize and selling to Netflix, “La Bola Negra” has been an object of fascination across the film world. And since it became the first non-English-language film since 2011 to win the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival, it’s been perceived as the only Oscar contender that might topple “The Odyssey” come March. (“The Odyssey” is a technically dazzling, timeline-toggling examination of the power of love set against the madness of war, while “La Bola Negra” is … also all of those things, just made on a much smaller budget. And for those who consider Los Javis too out of nowhere to get past Nolan — well, who’d heard of the Daniels before they beat Steven Spielberg?)

Which means that these two actors, not yet well-known in the U.S., are about to be everywhere. And that niceness that Almodóvar identified might take Guitarricadelafuente a long way. The singer has a sweetly earnest disposition, with a floaty tendency to remember the emotional truth of working with Los Javis, while Bernardeau is more plainspoken, analytical and forthright, and never once slips into speaking Spanish, even as his co-star lets off soft “Sí”s like punctuation. Together, though, they are comfortable enough to pick up sentences where the other leaves off, and to chuckle — sometimes ruefully, sometimes giddily — while remembering the film shoot that made Guitarricadelafuente an actor, and that changed both their lives.

If the film does score at the Academy Awards, it’ll be a milestone for global cinema, for Netflix and for queer artists: Although Bernardeau doesn’t identify as queer, Guitarricadelafuente is among several out gay actors playing gay characters in the Oscar race, including Andrew Scott of “Elsinore” and Jordan Firstman of “Club Kid.” That makes this year, perhaps, an even gayer Oscar race than the one where “Moonlight” beat a musical, befuddling Faye Dunaway.

But more than 20 years after 2005’s “Brokeback Mountain” won nearly every precursor but lost on Oscar night, are audiences ready for a movie this steamy and provocative? What’s onscreen is potent, so much so that the actors say they had to take care to keep the romance from becoming so overwhelming that it strained credulity. “We had to work against it and try to manage the volume of that love,” Bernardeau says, “because it’s an impossible love.”

Through their efforts, something universal emerges — assuming a post-“Brokeback,” post-“Moonlight” audience is open to it. “Older generations that would have been scandalized by this 20 years ago are gonna understand it right now,” Guitarricadelafuente says. “And this transcends: It’s a story about love that everybody can feel linked to.”

“La Bola Negra” links itself to the audience’s sentiments through deep specificity. It refuses to hold our hand, trusting us to keep up as the work and life story of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca grow increasingly woven into the text, or when a notification sound from gay sex app Grindr is the cue that first shunts us into modern times. “I don’t like movies that treat me like I’m dumb,” says Calvo, 35, via Zoom during a joint interview with Ambrossi. “The audience is smart enough. When I see ‘Chernobyl,’ I maybe don’t get some nuclear stuff, but I’m in it. In the gay world — no difference.”

In an unprecedented show of confidence, Netflix is giving the film a 47-day theatrical release, starting Oct. 16.

“We made this movie for the screen,” says Ambrossi, 42. “We shot it in 35mm. So that was good news, that people can experience the movie as we thought they would. But Netflix, you can rewatch — you can see all of Penélope Cruz’s numbers again and again.”

“And over and over and over again!” Calvo jumps in.

Netflix’s acquisition deal was announced on the festival’s last day. For a streamer that has earned Oscars — but, frustratingly for its ambitious leadership, never best picture — for films by global cinema stalwarts like Jane Campion, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro, the relative upstarts Los Javis may, surprisingly, represent its best chance yet at Oscar’s top prize. Two years ago, the company bet on a different Cannes prize winner about queerness told in the Spanish language, and the fate “Emilia Pérez” met after lead actress Karla Sofía Gascón’s incendiary old tweets emerged may help account for why team “La Bola Negra” speaks, to a one, thoughtfully and deliberately. The directors are eager to make the leap into being globally known auteurs: Los Javis previously created the biographical TV series “Veneno,” about trans Spanish singer Cristina Ortiz Rodríguez, which aired stateside on HBO Max in 2020. In their home country, they’re famous as judges on “Drag Race España,” and became the subject of speculation over their romantic relationship — they broke up during the making of “La Bola Negra,” but remain creative partners.

Calvo mentions that while both “Brokeback Mountain” and “Moonlight” boosted acceptance of queer love, he hopes that “La Bola Negra,” which is more direct in its depiction of gay sensuality and the male body, can push still further. “There’s no better way to get people to understand things than art and movies,” he says. “They’re a really good vehicle for creating empathy — because when you cry with someone, you’re always bonded to that story, to that person, to that community.”

He sees the change films have made, though, as incremental rather than revolutionary. “Thanks to the work of activists, artists, step by step, it’s a better place. But hate is a shadow that still haunts us.” The success of “La Bola Negra” may indicate something hopeful in our dark historical moment — that a love story, especially a seemingly impossible one, can stop us in our tracks and make us feel.

But to get there, the directors needed to find their perfect leading men. What Almodóvar may have deemed simply nice, Calvo calls “this sad-eyes, little-gay-soldier look” — an easily wounded, fragile quality that had shown through in Guitarricadelafuente’s music. As a singer, he’s collaborated with the Australian pop star Troye Sivan, and, sylphlike and dreamy, he cuts a similar figure, just in the Spanish language; though he hasn’t crossed over stateside, Guitarricadelafuente sells out arenas in Spain.

The singer’s casting also felt political: As a young actor, Calvo played a gay character in the issue-driven teen drama “Física o Química.” “And then nobody hired me anymore,” he says. “People tend to hire straight stars because they don’t want to risk money, which I think is homophobic. We wanted to make this statement.”

The directors approached Guitarricadelafuente at Primavera Sound, a music festival held in Barcelona, where he lives. “You’re saying this because everybody’s drinking right now,” the singer recalls telling them. “You’ve had too many drinks!” The next day, though, Calvo messaged Guitarricadelafuente and asked him to come to Madrid, where Los Javis live. They explained the character they had in mind, one they hadn’t yet started writing but knew was right for him. It was a “Star Is Born” moment — which Guitarricadelafuente has now heard a thousand times.

“Gaga is the exact example that everybody talks to me about!” he laughs. “You’re Lady Gaga! You’re Lady Gaga!” (He relates more to Rosario Flores, a Latin Grammy-winning songstress who appeared in Almodóvar’s “Talk to Her.”) While he was uncertain about acting, his character’s sweetness and connection to music, felt legible to the newly minted actor. “If I was born in that village, in those circumstances,” Guitarricadelafuente says, “that would exactly be me.” Among the points “La Bola Negra” makes is that our contemporary understanding of queerness isn’t a historical constant — that it was learned, and fought for, by people following their hearts despite colossal opposition. A young man in a small town in 1937 might never have realized what lay beyond.

Guitarricadelafuente’s background as a musician only helped make his case to his prospective directors. “All the decisions you take when you’re singing to make things one line louder, one line softer — everything is an acting decision,” Calvo remembers telling him. “So we’ll guide you. We’ve been acting teachers — we know how to work with newcomers.” But Guitarricadelafuente’s scene partner needed to be someone less green. “We couldn’t have two nonactors,” Calvo says. “There’s something interesting in having a wildness in a newcomer that is ready to give all of himself, reminding actors with long careers that they have to let themselves go, and the technique of the professional actors teaching the newcomers.”

Enter Bernardeau, who studied acting in Los Angeles but returned to Spain to find fame on the Netflix teen soap “Elite.” In it, he played the popular stud at an exclusive prep school. The show ran eight seasons, but Bernardeau departed after the fourth. “I learned a lot doing ‘Elite’ about what I wanted and what I didn’t want,” he says. The practice of being on camera on a major production was helpful, he says, but global popularity on a Netflix hit brought tabloid fame. Not every actor wants their Wikipedia to have a “Personal life” section, as Bernardeau’s does.

“What happened later was something that we didn’t expect, and changed our lives and made us reconsider everything,” he says. “I had to protect myself from not getting too busy in what people were saying. It helped me to know what I want — the kind of actor I want to be.”

Bernardeau met Los Javis at the Goya Awards, and they told him that they wanted him to read for them. A week later, he did, and felt he’d botched it. “I woke up every morning and I was like, ‘Please give me another chance.’ Then the casting directors called me again.” At their next meeting, the directors offered Bernardeau the role.

“I hate auditions!” Ambrossi says — he doesn’t even recall that first audition. Los Javis knew they wanted Bernardeau, and the rest was a formality. “We trust ourselves a lot as actors’ directors. It’s what I told Álvaro.” (Guitarricadelafuente’s real name is Álvaro Lafuente Calvo; his grandmother gave him his nickname, which combines “guitarrica,” a diminutive that means “small guitar,” with his surname.) “It’s not your song, but you will have to find a middle point between our text and your voice.”

It had been important to the directors to give an out gay performer a chance to lead their movie. But Bernardeau’s straightness didn’t stand in the way of his being cast. “I totally get why straight actors want to play gay roles,” says Ambrossi. “It’s their craft to portray people that are different from them. I’m not against that. The political statement is still there with the LGBTQ+ people on camera and behind the camera. I guess Miguel is in such a good moment in his career that he wanted a challenge.” Bernardeau’s character, Rafael Rodríguez Rapún, was a real person — an activist and actor who’d been Lorca’s romantic partner before the poet’s 1936 assassination by Franco’s forces, spurring Rodríguez Rapún to fight the fascists. Ambrossi notes that his sexuality was a source of confusion. “Rafael was not an open gay man. He was confused — someone that was not able to say what he wanted.”

For his part, Bernardeau says he felt no doubt whatsoever about playing a gay role, even though, until the last decade or so, many actors shied away from onscreen intimacy with other men. “I never thought about it like that, or cared what people would think about my sexuality,” he says.

Once shooting was underway, Los Javis leaned on the trust they’d built with their leading men during the casting process. The actors didn’t use an intimacy coordinator, nor did they feel they needed one. “We just worked it out with the Javis,” Bernardeau says.

“Sí,” adds Guitarricadelafuente. “I remember Ambrossi saying, Just kiss. Just a little bit more.” The cast and crew were living in the northern town of Comillas, where they were shooting in an old hospital. They gathered one night in Ambrossi’s kitchen to “go, How are we gonna do this?” Guitarricadelafuente says. “We wrote the script of what’s going to happen the next day between us — meeting ourselves, thanks to the direction of the Javis.”

“We learned how to be directors doing our thing and learning by ourselves,” Ambrossi says, “so we are super aware how much you need the space to make mistakes, to try new things, to get mistaken. We always wanted to give them that space of freedom.”

Bernardeau had a teen TV-hunk image that he was subverting not just by playing gay but by allowing himself to be objectified by Sebastián. And yet he didn’t feel conflicted about it when shooting a nude scene where his character is recovering from his injuries on an army cot. “I was very comfortable doing everything,” he says, “because I understood exactly what they needed. And they were not like these directors that are on the monitors and have this tent where they’re away. They’re holding your hand, crying with you many times and telling you, Thank you for this.”

It wasn’t just during the love scenes that the directors shed tears. “They cry with you,” Guitarricadelafuente agrees. “When we were preparing the character, I went to Madrid to meet them and to do some acting exercises to reach the emotion — places of your inner self that you didn’t reach before.” He offers an example: Because the innocent Sebastián is deeply connected to his mother, Calvo and Ambrossi asked Guitarricadelafuente to imagine being held in his mother’s arms. On shooting days, they would pull him aside, put on music and discuss what the singer calls “the traumas” — they’d weep, then get ready to shoot.

“There was a very therapeutic thing about it,” Guitarricadelafuente says.

“We cried so many times together.”

Los Javis speak with me the day of the movie’s Toronto debut, and they present a study in contrasts. Ambrossi can’t sit still, and has left his hotel to speed-walk through the city, speaking rapidly and barely glancing at his phone screen. Calvo, meanwhile, sits at a desk in his hotel room, gazing into the camera lens placidly while idly sketching on a sheet of paper.

As we speak, the film’s success at TIFF lies ahead. And waiting doesn’t suit them. Indeed, at Cannes, Calvo sat through the screening in a state of torment. He’d shown up at the theater at 3 a.m. the night before to set the volume. “I was so tired, and I was like, Play it really loud. And then when we were there, I was like, I think I put it too loud. Javi was like, Shut up! Let me enjoy it!” It was only after the movie ended that Calvo dialed back into the experience, and began to cry.

Ambrossi is accustomed to micromanaging — because he’s always had to. “The posters, the merchandising, calling networks — Please, I need more money — I’m very used to that. So this movie — everything was very hard. It was the biggest effort I ever made.” So Cannes provided a moment of serenity. “I felt peaceful, and it was a new feeling for me to feel peaceful. I saw Tilda Swinton’s face in the next row — Oh my God, what’s happening?”

Diva worship is a thread that connects the ex-lovers: Calvo gravely corrects my statement that, between Cannes and “Drag Race España,” the pair toggle between high and low culture. “For me,” he intones, “drag is high art.” For their part, the stars of “La Bola Negra” marvel at their directors’ varied interests. “I think it would be cool to have Christopher Nolan as a ‘Drag Race’ juror,” Bernardeau says. “Woody Allen!” Guitarricadelafuente fires back drily.

Calvo uses drag-club slang to describe Cruz’s character, Nené Romero — “She is mothering!” he says. Nené is a cupletista, a Spanish singer whose bawdy, openly sexual acts were inspired by the goings-on at the Moulin Rouge. “They talked about sex, drugs, all the experiences in the street, and they were friends with gay and lesbian writers. They were the first pop stars you get in Spain,” Calvo says. Cruz’s performance — which has, despite its brevity, sparked Oscar chatter, and which might, along with her work in Olivia Wilde’s “The Invite,” make her the first performer to get two nominations in one category under the Academy’s new rules — recalls Liza Minnelli’s in “Cabaret.” Minnelli’s Sally Bowles lived loud and hard in the last days before Weimar Berlin fell to Adolf Hitler. On the precipice of Franco’s dictatorship, Cruz’s character is doing the same.

Nené — outrageous and drag-inflected — opens Sebastián up to the power of queerness, and Cruz played a similar role for Guitarricadelafuente. “She was a godmother in every single aspect,” Ambrossi says. “Guitarricadelafuente, she took such care of him. But she was so generous — she wanted to support the message of this movie and the importance of the political statement behind it.”

“She was so generous and gentle and trying to encourage you,” Guitarricadelafuente says. “This poor guy in the middle of the civil war, this beautiful show is the first time you see him smiling. And her role in this is very important, because she’s going to be a mother for a lot of queer people that are going to see this.” Guitarricadelafuente notes that Nené seems to intuit that about his sexuality that Sebastián cannot yet put into words. “She’s like the English teacher who encourages you to see beautiful things — she already knows. She knows before you know.”

In the midst of telling a story about self-discovery and new love, Los Javis transitioned from romantic and creative partners to solely creative partners. Endlessly protective of their actors, they kept their breakup under wraps during the shoot.

“I didn’t even notice,” Guitarricadelafuente says. “I noticed after we ended filming.”

“They told me on my last day,” says Bernardeau.

Guitarricadelafuente didn’t want to believe the news, despite gossip swirling around the production. “There was like a fuss, because they are very known in Spain,” he says. “I was like, I’m having dinner with them every day, and they’re so close.”

Today the directors are philosophical about their split. “When we get into a project, it’s a road to the unknown,” says Calvo, “and we always trust that by the end of the road, we are going to be different people.”

“Yeah!” interjects Ambrossi.

“And that’s the good thing about doing what we do,” Calvo says. “The way I see creation is: You can’t make a project that is not going to change your life forever, and I was grateful for this project to make us evolve and make us explore new ways of living.”

This evolution happened at the moment the pair’s stature on the film scene was about to shift, first with Cannes and possibly again next March. But they’re not allowing themselves to think as far ahead as the Oscars, even as Netflix, with “La Bola Negra” as the crown jewel in its 2026 slate, clearly is.

“Javi Ambrossi — I think he’s a witch. Not a witch, but he has a spiritual thing. He knows things about the future, and he’s not telling us,” Guitarricadelafuente says.

“And his phrase is always ‘Step by step, step by step,’” Bernardeau adds. “And you’re like, ‘Step by step’?! These are big leaps!”

Ambrossi learned this incrementalism from moviemaking. He used to be an actor, too, and becoming a director — with so many tasks competing for his attention all at once — was terrifying until he simplified the process for himself. “You have to go frame by frame — it’s the only way to do things,” he says. “Day by day, frame by frame. You do your best every single second, and it will be OK. Today is the Toronto premiere. Hopefully, people will connect. We’ll see tomorrow.”

For his part, Calvo emphasizes the film’s potential impact — illuminating a story of queer hope during a dark stretch of history, then as now. His ambitions reach beyond the Oscar race. Academy attention, he says, “would be a dream come true, but you should remember why you made the movie. Making the movie was a dream. Everything is a dream. So we just keep dreaming.”

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