Larchmont Village feels like an oasis of calm after two hectic days caroming through car-clogged streets and stop-and-go freeways in Los Angeles. I’m greeted by the smell of fresh coffee roasting at the artisan café and bakery Reynaldo Pacheco ’06 has recommended for breakfast. Rey arrives a moment later in workout clothes, baseball hat worn backwards.
“That’s why I live in this area—to get a little bit of quiet,” he says. “The vibration in Los Angeles is intense. It attracts a lot of people for the wrong reasons. There’s a lot of desperation.”
Desperate hardly describes Rey these days. NBC News called him “the heartbeat” of Our Brand Is Crisis, the 2015 film starring Sandra Bullock and produced by George Clooney. Before that was Beginners with Academy Award winner Christopher Plummer and Ewan McGregor, Without Men with Eva Longoria, TV appearances on CSI and numerous commercials.
His career is taking off after 10 years here and he’s grateful, but wary.
“It changes you,” he says.
I don’t see it. When he returned to Wabash three weeks earlier to screen Our Brand Is Crisis, he seemed very much the same old Rey: That rare student who embraced every artistic opportunity the place had to offer and made up his own—performing in and writing plays, singing, acting, and painting. A guy who worked with kids in Crawfordsville’s Vanity Theater and took that creative feedback loop on the road to Paris and to an indigenous theater group in Chiapas, coming back with stories to tell alumni in Wabash Magazine. All while majoring in political science to appease his father, a former government minister in Bolivia. When he left for film school at the University of Southern California and decided to stay in LA, friends worried he was too generous, too optimistic to make it.
But when he returned to Korb Classroom in March to screen his greatest star-turn yet, there were no Hollywood airs—just generous answers to any question, a smile when we applauded as his name appeared in the credits, hugs for his many Crawfordsville friends, and an immediate “okay” to our last-minute request to interview him on camera at 10 p.m.
“Sure seem like the same guy to me, Rey,” I say.
“I’m not as open and trusting as I was at Wabash,” he insists. “Here I can’t do that. I lost that sense of community, that purity, seeing the goodness in people.”
He says working on Our Brand Is Crisis brought back some of that “old Reynaldo.”
In the film he plays an energetic if naïve volunteer named Eddie who works with Sandra Bullock’s character, “Calamity Jane” Bodine. She’s a political strategist brought in from the U.S. to win the presidency for Pedro Castillo, a former president run out of the job after a scandal. Eddie’s father supported Castillo, so the son becomes a true believer, yearning to improve his country and honor his late father.
The film is a fictionalized account of the notorious 2002 Bolivian election. Director David Gordon Green didn’t realize it when he cast Rey as Eddie, but Rey’s father served in the administration of the real-life version of Castillo, Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada.
“I was a kid when all that happened,” Rey says. “My dad would take me behind the scenes to see it. Going back was surreal.”
Revisiting La Paz also returned him to his acting roots, where as a teenager he performed with a street theater company.
“We were right back in those same streets,” he says. He even took cast members to a theater where he had performed.
Preparing for the role reinvigorated him.
“My character was younger than I am. He’s the only one in the movie who is pure. To get that look I changed my diet, started exercising. I started forgiving myself, forgiving those who had hurt me.
“I started coming back to the old Reynaldo—someone who could see the damage, but also the good person behind that. I got to experience that rebirth.”
Rey found joy in improvising scenes with Sandra Bullock.
“Sandy always finds the comedic moment in everything—she has such timing,” he says. “She’s always finding that element of surprise.”
But ultimately he experienced that loss of innocence all over again as Eddie. After Castillo’s victory, Eddie watches him break a major campaign promise. He confronts Jane, who washes her hands of the outcome and tells him that’s just the way the system works.
“That scene with Sandra was powerful,” Rey says. “After that I go out into the street and that poison starts to get in to my system. If you look at that final take, it looks like I’ve aged.
“Many people died during that period of Bolivia’s history. This is the story of powerful people and that selfishness, that way of living, breeds something dark.”
Working so closely with one of Hollywood’s top stars also made him more aware than ever of the pitfalls of fame.“You’re never alone. Someone walks you to the airplane, and when you walk out of it, there’s someone there to meet you. The minute people find out where Sandra’s going to be, the paparazzi are there. You have to have security—it’s like you’re a walking bank.
“You get very famous, you can be damaged.”