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Don’t let Cassandro, which began streaming on Amazon Prime Video today, slip under your radar. This biopic, which premiered earlier this year at the 2023 Sundance Film Festival, recounts a vital piece of queer history: the rise of famed gay luchador, Saúl Armendáriz.
Featuring an all-time best performance from Mexican actor Gael García Bernal (Mozart in the Jungle), Cassandro is magical and moving. Directed by Roger Ross Williams, who also co-wrote the screenplay with David Teague, it’s an empathetic portrait of a brave but troubled gay icon. And for the uninitiated, the movie shines a light on the compelling Cassandro true story. Read on to find out more about the real-life Cassandro, including where Saúl Armendáriz is now.
Is Cassandro based on a true story?
Yes. Cassandro is based on the true story of Saúl Armendáriz, an American-born Mexican wrestler who rose to fame in the ’80s and ’90s under the ring name Cassandro. Cassandro was an exoticó character, or a luchador who wears drag in a caricature of a gay man. The exoticos were villains, meant to be mocked, and they were meant to lose. But Armendáriz, an openly gay man, turned the stereotype on its head. He won matches, and turned Cassandro into a gay hero.
Armendáriz grew up in El Paso, Texas but spent much of his youth across the border in Juarez, Mexico at lucha libre wrestling matches. Armendáriz first began wrestling at the age of 17 as a “rudo,” a brawling wrestler that emphasizes brute strength. Armendáriz’s mentor, an exoticó who went by the name Baby Sharon, showed him another way. Though the Amazon movie suggests that Cassandro was the first out gay luchador, in a 2014 profile in The New Yorker, Armendáriz says it was Baby Sharon who was the first luchador to publicly come out.
In 1992, Cassandro won a world lightweight championship and became the first exótico to win a world title. But as he became more famous, he also developed a substance abuse problem. In the New Yorker piece, Armendáriz recalled his mother’s death in 1997 being a wake-up call for him. “I was still high when my mother passed,” he said. “She was my greatest enabler. She loved me so much. I did her makeup in the morgue. I was high when I did it. It was terrible. The worst part is I would have ended up dead or in prison if she had not died. I have a lot of guilt and shame over that.”
In that same profile, Armendáriz reflected on his romance with a married man, played by Raúl Castillo in the film.
“I spent twelve years with a straight married lover,” Armendáriz told The New Yorker. “From the age of eighteen to thirty. It was very damaging. There were five, ten, fifteen minutes of heaven in bed. Otherwise, he was bitching at me. He was a luchador. We both went to Mexico City. But only my career went up and up and up. He was with his wife, in Juárez.”
Where is Saúl Armendáriz from Cassandro now?
Today, the real Cassandro—aka Saúl Armendáriz— is 53 years old and still lives in El Paso, Texas. In recent years, he has struggled with health issues. According to a report from El Paso Matters, he has aphasia disorder as the result of brain damage to the part of the brain that controls language. He had brain surgery in May 2021, and went through therapy to attempt to regain his speech. For that reason, he only does a select few interviews via text through his publicist.
In 2023, Armendáriz was inducted into the Lucha Libre AAA Worldwide Hall of Fame. He also attended the 2023 Sundance premiere of Cassandro in January, and walked the red carpet alongside Gael García Bernal.
