"It started when I dressed as a mime"

It's hard to imagine Carlos Areces pointing a gun at a child's head. But no image is insurmountable for Álex de la Iglesia. The director had the vision while shooting Plutón BRB Nero, the TV series in which Areces plays a petty officer aboard a crazy spaceship.

"It all started the day they dressed me up as a mime," the actor recalls. "Álex couldn't stop laughing. He said to me, 'It would be good if you were a killer sad clown who went around hitting people to death with his little saxophone'."

From that De la Iglesia kept coming up with more ideas for scenes: a clown threatening a family, two clowns facing death... "It was all so brutal, so grotesque, so absolutely wrong, that I said, 'Yes, please, let's do it'," laughs Areces.

"I spent four days stark naked in nettles. 'What is this,' I thought, 'Jackass?'"

"This is the first step for an actor who is going to be a legend," says De la Iglesia

Against all predictions, Sad Trumpet Ballad, a tragicomic portrait of a love triangle in a Spanish circus at the end of the Franco era, ended up taking over from La marca amarilla, the large-scale project De La Iglesia had planned. The supposedly minor work went on to carry off two big prizes (Best Director and Best Script) at the Venice Film Festival, where jury head Quentin Tarantino was captivated by the violent humor of his Spanish emulator.

Areces confirms the director's sadistic streak. "In two months I was subjected to situations that I have avoided my whole life: running naked and frozen through the countryside, riding an elephant, throwing myself backwards into thin air..." The full-frontal nudity was particularly traumatic. "I spent four days stark naked in stinging nettles. And I could only think, 'God, what is this? Jackass?' In the breaks, when I was wrapped in a blanket full of dried mud, numb, unable to utter a word, and thinking that my humiliation couldn't get any worse, Álex would appear behind me and sing softly in my ear, 'How I love you, how I love yoooouuu...' He thought doing it would cheer me up, but no. It was hard to believe he was enjoying my physical pain so much."

"Carlos is like the Pietà," De la Iglesia says by way of justification. "His face reflects all the world's pain."

Everything, though, has its reward. All those who have seen the film reach a consensus about Areces. "This is the first step in the career of an actor who is going to be legendary," says De la Iglesia. "He is going to be at the level of [José Luis] López Vázquez, Pepe Isbert and Alfredo Landa, a face of the true Spanish cinema, also capable of major drama."

Joaquín Reyes, his colleague on TV comedy series La hora chanante, Muchachada nui and, now, Museo Coconut, defines it more bluntly: "He pulls the same face to say 'I love you' as he does to say 'I shit myself.' Which is something very difficult." Reyes adds that Areces is "becoming a diva. I have already told them to indulge his every whim on the Museo Coconut set."

The first person to bow to Areces has been Reyes himself. Miss Coconut, the owner of the museum inspired by Baroness Thyssen, "was going to be the main character in the series," says Reyes - "Carlos looks brilliant dressed up as a woman." That was until Areces rebelled against having to wear women's clothing the whole time. The matter ended in a tie: Miss Coconut would make a cameo appearance in each episode and in exchange Reyes would play another character, the museum guide Rosario.

The typecasting is sure to disappear with Areces' next two projects. In January he will shoot Lobos de Arga, a horror comedy about a town besieged by a werewolf. And he's just finished Extraterrestre, in which Nacho Vigalondo, self-styled wizard of tacky science fiction, doesn't include a single martian.

Areces has already set himself up as the perfect anti-hero of Iberian cinema in Spanish Movie, where he played the B-side of Javier Bardem. At the wrap party for that film he met Santiago Segura - who plays his father in Sad Trumpet Ballad - and discovered a kindred spirit: both are obsessive collectors of comics, especially those published by Bruguera in the 1950s and 1960s.

"I am an unhealthy and obsessive accumulator," he says. "Entering my house gives a feeling of complete anguish. Almost everything I collect is ancient. I have always been very tied to old things. Since I was small there has been an old man in me struggling to get out; now he has taken complete control." Old photos fascinate him. In particular, of teenagers on the day of their communion, and post-mortem photography. "It is a genre I discovered watching Amenábar's The Others. I got hold of the book that inspired the film, Sleeping Beauty by Dr Stanley Burns, and since then I haven't been able to stop."

Areces' mother, a civil servant, was his first accomplice in art and business: she xeroxed the caricatures of teachers he did so he could sell them in the school playground. Over time he has become a recognized cartoonist (he studied fine arts and has been published in El Jueves and Fotogramas).

What does his mother say about his career as an actor? "She doesn't much distinguish between Álex's film and the Muchachada nui episodes. When I came back from Venice I gave her all the newspapers with news of the prize and she said, 'Ah, very good. And what do you want me to do with all this? Keep it or throw it away?"