Demián Bichir is feeling playful

Demián Bichir refers to it as ‘the theater connection,’ and it sure can lead an actor to some intriguingly unexpected places. Like scaling the summit of the Mexican box office, staring into the mirror and seeing Fidel Castro or spanking Mary-Louise Parker, Bichir’s partner in crime and, lately, passion on Showtime’s ‘Weeds.’ Whenever Bichir meets another actor who cut his or her teeth in the theater, ‘we all go crazy about it,’ says the fiercely handsome Mexico City-born performer, who will make his U.S. stage debut tonight at the Geffen Playhouse. He’s costarring with Shannon Cochran in the two-character drama ‘By the Waters of Babylon’ by Pulitzer Prize winner Robert Schenkkan about an unlikely Austin, Texas, encounter between a Cuban novelist transformed by fate into an immigrant gardener and a withdrawn academic widow. He’s also prominently on screen this fall as Castro in Steven Soderbergh’s Che Guevara diptych, ‘The Argentine’ and ‘Guerrilla.’ In the theater, Bichir continues, ‘there is a link that connects, because once you’ve been on the stage your life cannot be the same, as an audience or an actor.’ Certainly Bichir’s life hasn’t been the same since he hooked his first acting job in a Mexican telenovela at age 14. Born into a family of well-known thespians, he quickly began landing film and television roles between theater stints with his family. Among his roles was Alan Strang, the boy with the equine-erotic fixation in ‘Equus,’ in a cast that included Patricia Bernal (Gael’s mom) as Alan’s would-be lover, Jill.