Los Javis Talk Casting Penélope Cruz and Glenn Close in Epic ‘La Bola Negra’ and Championing Queer Stories: ‘We Deserve to Have Big Movies’

Javier Ambrossi and Javier Calvo, known as Los Javis, are the most influential creative duo currently working in Spain. The two are behind the hit series “Veneno” and “Dressed in Blue,” with their thriller “La Mesías” acclaimed at the Sundance Film Festival and prized at France’s Series Mania on its way to becoming the most award-winning series in the history of their home country.

The creatives have had a hand in the careers of many burgeoning names of this Spanish golden generation, and are now about to add another major accolade to their packed mantle by screening “La Bola Negra” in competition at the Cannes Film Festival. 

“La Bola Negra” is an ambitious epic inspired by the work of Spanish poet and playwright Federico García Lorca. It chronicles the intertwined lives of three men across three different eras: 1932, 1937 and 2017. 

Singer Guitarricadelafuente makes his screen debut as Sebastián, a young soldier conscripted into fighting for the Fascists during the Spanish Civil War and tasked with minding Republican prisoner Rafael, played by “Elite” breakout Miguel Bernardeau. In modern days, playwright Carlos González’s Alberto receives a phone call about a mysterious inheritance left by his estranged grandfather, while the 1932 chapter gives the film its name by following the drama of a young man refused membership into a tight-knit casino due to his sexuality. 

Speaking with Variety on the morning of their film’s world premiere, Ambrossi grins from ear to ear in anticipation of hearing the thoughts of those first audiences to watch the film. “I feel very, very happy right now,” he says. “It’s a very unique feeling.”

Asked about being in Cannes competition alongside Pedro Almodóvar, a huge influence in their career and now their mentor and collaborator, as well as another fellow Spaniard in Rodrigo Sorogoyen, Ambrossi says it is “surreal.” “I admire Pedro immensely. He is to me our great director, and he inspired me so much professionally but also personally as a gay kid.” 

“I have learned so much from watching his films, and he was always very kind and generous with us,” he adds. “I don’t feel like I can even say we are competing with Pedro and Sorogoyen because they are better [laughs]. I look up to them.” 

Ambrossi adds he is “very proud of Spanish cinema,” calling the country’s current buzz “an incredible moment.” Spain is only behind France in the number of Palme d’Or contenders in 2025 and 2026, with Carla Simón’s “Romería” and Oliver Laxe’s “Sirāt” playing in competition last year, and “La Bola Negra” joined by Almodóvar’s “Bitter Christmas” and Sorogoyen’s “The Beloved” in this edition. “What we are seeing is the result of several years of work and of continuous investment,” says Ambrossi. “These are the fruits of great labor, and I hope it continues for many, many years.” 

As they savor being at the world’s biggest film festival alongside their idol, Los Javis are also looking back at their efforts to platform a new generation of talent back home. “It was also hard for us to get chances as gay actors,” recalls Calvo. “I used to have an agent who said I had to hide my queerness to get work. Maybe he was right because I didn’t get that much work at the time. Once we had more opportunities, we knew we wanted to do the same for others. We felt it was important and that we had a responsibility to use our influence the right way.”

“We were very lucky that a lot of people trusted us when we were just starting, and we want to do the same with our production company,” echoes Ambrossi. “I do feel we are helping boost new voices in the industry, especially younger people and the LGBTQIA+ community. I think it’s beautiful that we can do for others what has been done for us.”

In this latent sense of community, “La Bola Negra” epitomizes Los Javis’s work, a film that works as a love letter to the lifesaving power of art and how preservation and memory can help new generations avoid the traumas of those who came before.

“‘Veneno’ was very important for young trans people all over the world, and hopefully ‘La Bola Negra’ will be a way for young audiences to discover the work of Federico Garcia Lorca,” says Ambrossi. 

“He’s so modern,” he goes on. “Hopefully, when young audiences go to see ‘La Bola Negra,’ they will go to the bookstore and buy some of his books and tell the world what happened to him. He was killed very young by fascists, and that cannot happen again.”

“La Bola Negra” is a superproduction with hundreds of extras, spanning several locations and boasting an intricate work of costume and production design that recreates not only wartime Spain but also brings to life to large-scale surrealist sequences. “We wanted to make a big movie,” immediately responds Ambrossi when asked about the magnitude of their latest.

“Javi and I were tired of the feeling that LGBT stories are niche,” he continues. “I love those films, too, but I needed to make a big movie with gay actors portraying gay characters. We wanted to make the biggest film we could make in Spain and to make it a statement. We deserve to have big movies and LGBT people deserve to be the leads of big movies. When I was a kid, I didn’t have super productions starring gay men. I wanted to give the world this idea of a super production that is auteur-driven but also very queer. We can make big things.” 

Calvo doubled down on that sentiment, stating he wanted their period piece to feel “real and fresh.” “We’ve seen too many period pieces in our country that follow the same formula. We were wondering how we could capture the feeling of when you look at an old picture, and you see people on the street, their faces, the way they look. They don’t look at the camera; they have no way of looking at themselves at all times. We started to ask a lot of questions about how we could look at the past with this emotional involvement.”

Los Javis enlist two internationally renowned actors in key but vastly distinct roles: Penélope Cruz as singer Nené in 1932 and Glenn Close as historian Isabelle in 2017. Speaking about their casting, Calvo says that one thing he has learned from Almodóvar is that, “when you make a movie, you put the things you love in the movie. It’s like a collage.”

“It was a very clear thing to us: take everything you like and make something new,” he continues. “If we’re making a war film, why don’t we get a cupletista, a Spanish singer from the ’30s who used to sing those really spicy songs? And then we kept dreaming. Couldn’t that be Penélope Cruz? And what is she going to do? She’s going to be a godmother who tells this kid you can be gay, you can be queer, you can be trans, you can be whatever you want because we were free in Madrid when we were young, and because of war, we are not anymore. So we kept dreaming until we had her.”

When it comes to Close, Calvo says there is this idea in Spain that those who study Spanish and Hispanic history are usually foreigners. “That’s because we don’t take responsibility for our history,” he adds. “This is why we thought we should have the historian character be American, and Glenn Close was a huge fan of ‘La Mesías,’ so we sent her an email. When she replied, saying she would do anything we wanted because she was a huge fan of ours, it was an ‘Oh my God’ moment.”

Ambrossi calls having the two actors a “dream,” as was the entire making of “La Bola Negra.” “We made the movie we wanted to make. We were thinking about the audience: What do you want to see? People want to see emotion; they want intensity. We wanted to give audiences that and to also have fun and not miss the pop part that is very much part of our work.”

“La Bola Negra” is produced by Los Javis’s label Suma Content in co-production with Los Esquiadores A.I.E., Movistar Plus, the Almodóvar brothers’ El Deseo and Le Pacte. Elastica handles Spanish distribution and Goodfellas handles international sales.