NEW YORK, Nov. 14 (UPI) — Antonio Banderas jokes he was still cleaning dirt out of his ears two months after he finished filming the mining drama The 33.
The 55-year-old actor plays one of the titular Chileans trapped underground for 69 days in the dramatization of the real-life, 2010 mine collapse.
To make the movie, the cast and crew headed to real mines in Colombia where they became unimaginably filthy, then found it difficult to freshen up after the cameras stopped rolling because the showers in their rural hotel had weak pressure and no hot water.
“5 o’clock in the morning at the hotel, you hear screaming. It was like a horror movie!” Banderas said at a recent New York press conference, recalling how cold the shower water was.
He also remembered how the real miners — whose lives inspired the film — gifted those working on the production with soap and brushes they swore would get them clean after a day deep in the Earth.
“After an hour and a half of brushing, you’re all red, but you think, ‘I’m clean.’ Well, no. You go to sleep. You know the Holy Shroud of Turin? That’s what we had in the bed in the morning. It was a negative picture of us right there. Two months after we finished the movie, I was still getting dirt out of my ears.”
The 33 is in theaters now.
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