Education Quote by Gael Garcia Bernal

Bernal’s line carries the quiet sting of someone who’s seen the glamour economy up close and still insists on the unprofitable art. Calling Mexican theater “very underground” isn’t just a description of venue size or audience reach; it’s a snapshot of cultural funding, class access, and visibility. Theater sits beneath the noise of mass media and streaming, where fame can be monetized and actors can live off a brand. Underground means you’re working outside the circuits that pay, outside the institutions that confer legitimacy, sometimes outside the country’s own sense of what “counts” as culture.

The quote works because it refuses the neat binary of struggle vs. reward. Bernal doesn’t romanticize poverty, but he also won’t reduce theater to a stepping-stone toward film. “Very difficult to make a living” is blunt, almost logistical; then he pivots to “a very beautiful pathway,” language that’s spiritual without getting mystical. Beauty here isn’t aesthetic wallpaper. It’s a claim that theater trains a different kind of intelligence: embodied empathy, live risk, listening as a craft, history as something you perform with other people in real time.

The subtext is a defense of the stage as an alternative education system, one that’s “open” because it’s porous: you learn from bodies, accents, neighborhoods, politics, and improvisation, not just from credentialed gatekeepers. Coming from a globally recognized film actor, it’s also a subtle act of redistribution: using mainstream visibility to point back toward the undervalued underground that made him.