Federico Luppi

Federico Luppi plays Casares, the orphanage's kind-hearted teacher, in Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone. The piece the British Film Institute archive singled out as the month's film reads the casting as a production strategy: as productions addressing Spain and Latin America together multiply, it means something to the writer that one of the two leads is an Argentine who has often worked in Spain and the other a Spaniard like Marisa Paredes. The same piece recalls him in Cronos, del Toro's first step into cinema, where he played a mild-mannered antiquarian turned into a rabid zombie by a mechanical vampire, the character matched with Argentine tangos. Of the twenty-seven films he has in our catalogue, only The Devil's Backbone was reviewed in the archive.