Nick Frost is not the first person you’d associate with a Salsa movie, Chayanne maybe, Patrick Swayze, but that of course is the point of Cuban Fury, a romantic comedy in which Frost plays a depressed 40-something, out of touch with his body and soul and youthful dreams. Years previously, Bruce (Nick Frost) had been a teenage salsa dancer competing in Ballroom competitions, until some thugs put an end to his dancing ambitions. It takes 20 years and, of course some Latin flava, to get his mojo back in spectacularly comic fashion. Cuban Fury is a feel-good film about finding your inner strength and stepping out of your shell – and of course its funny, in that British self-deprecating kind of way. Latinolife: Hello Nick, how are you? Nick Frost: I am very well thanks, I’m here in my office in town, I come here every day and write… actually thinking of having a pint! LL: I went to see your film last night, I enjoyed that I have to say NF: So you came to the screening I did the intro for! LL: Yes, it surprised me when you mentioned that it was your idea to make a dance film, was it your idea to make it a Salsa film rather than Tango or Ballroom? NF: The idea was always Salsa, it is a dance where you need to have a partner and that partner is a woman, well 9 times out of 10. It had to be about the physical contact and in this case for someone who is British, the fear of that physical contact can be overwhelming! LL: Totally agree, but how did you know this if you were not into it before, did you do any research, did you secretly go out to spy on people in Salsa clubs? NF: Yes! During the seven months training I went through, we went out quite a lot. But even before I took my first dance lesson, they took me out. I just watched and drank rum…which was nice. Apart from the actual physical training, the hardest thing for me, at least for the first 4-6 weeks was learning that it was ok to touch my partner…you don’t have to be afraid of her! LL: How did you feel when you landed in your first scenes with real salseros. Salsa people are a community, even though you a major actor coming to the scene causes a lot of excitement, still you were entering a world that was totally new to you. NF: Well part of the reason I tried very hard to learn was to pay my own respect to the community, even when this is a comedy about dancing, I did not want to take the piss out of Salsa, this is not what the film is about, we are taking the piss if anything about the lead character’s Englishness, when he finds his fire, he starts to become a better man. We wanted the community to embrace us. We took their feedback as they felt they wanted to talk to us. One of the things that stuck with me when I went to a Salsa club was I walked upstairs to another room, from the Cuban room to a Kizomba room, and I noticed on the stairs all the pairs of shoes, and I never seen that, people bringing their dance shoes to go dancing! It was an amazing thing. That gave me a real insight into the community which is you can leave your shoes there and they wont get stolen, where I am from you leave your trainers in the stairs and they will not be there when they come back! LL: I must admit salsa clubs are pretty safe, there is hardly ever problems of violence or crime as far as I know… NF: I think as soon as the community realized that I was putting a lot of effort, not just to learn how to dance but to learn about Latinos here in London, they started to take us more seriously. We heard back they were really honored and proud by the effort we put in and that is what we wanted, we wanted a film that was for them as much as anybody else. LL: I am Latino, but not a “salsero” in the sense that go out to take classes and buy dancing shoes kinda thing, but what I like about the film is that it’s not a film about Salsa per se, but rather about someone who is becoming a better person. NF: Absolutely. That is absolutely on it! LL: I love the fact that you did not take the piss out of Salsa, man, like most British media do, the whole cliché of it being cheesy is so boring… NF: I think the salsa they take the piss out is the five English girls and the five English boys doing salsa in the back room of the pub in Hertfordshire, that is an easy target! Even so, knowing what I know, those five girls and boys in Hertfordshire, shouldn’t be laughed at. Salsa might be the highpoint of their week, when they get their dance fix. Has dancing become part of your life? Have you been transformed into a salsa beast!? Ha, ha. The sad thing is that we shot this film 18 months ago and I’ve shot three films since then. Shooting a film is so time consuming, that I find it very difficult to not do anything other than either shooting or being with my family. My wife does not dance so I’d have to make an excuse where I basically say to her, Honey why don’t you put the baby to bed and I go and dance with a girl, a really beautiful girl from Madrid that you don’t know…for 5 hours! I don’t think that would go down too well… Something that really surprised me was seeing you dancing, like proper dancing! How was the whole training thing, because six months is basically the equivalent of two seasons of Strictly in one go! Seven months, it was a lot…I went through a lot of different emotions. At the beginning I was really kind of disappointed that I did not look like Richard (Marcel, the choreographer). It’s like watching Roger Federer or Tiger Woods…they make it look so easy, you think you’ll be able to do it. I once watched some Eddie Torres videos in Youtube, essentially he doesn’t look like he’s doing very much at all, but if you try to do it, its like wading through treacle. If you’ve never done it, you don’t realize how much it takes to get to that level. That was incredibly frustrating. I felt kind of trapped because I was like ‘I have to do this now, even if it kills me’, because at the end of that seven month period there is a film waiting to be made, someone has invested a lot of money to make this film, people like Richard Marcel, Susana Montero, Robert Charlemagne and everyone had to teach me, and I felt a lot of responsibility to finish the job. And then about three months in, something happened where it suddenly started to click for me and I did not feel weird anymore, I didn’t ache as much and I looked slightly more like Richard, than I did at the beginning, until we got to a point where we were a few days from shooting and I was dancing with Yanet Fuentes and I did not feel strange at all, it just felt great! It was a real journey. LL: I can see that, you can actually dance, well done for that! Before I finish, was there any other aspect of Latino culture that you took away with you, because a lot of salsa people don’t actually to listen to salsa music in its own right off the dance floor like Latinos do, and in the film the music is spot on. I think the soundtrack is as good as any other Latino or Salsa film out there. NF: Absolutely, I never listened to Salsa before. When I was young, I worked in Chiquitos a ‘Mexican’ restaurant and they played the same Salsa CD continuously, day in day out, and because of that I think there something in my brain that switched off with Salsa. But since the film I do have a lot of Salsa in my Ipod. There is a track by Eddie Palmieri, Vamonos Pal Monte, I listen to it most days…I just love it! But apart from the music I would suggest to you there is a direct correlation between Salsa music, dancing and happiness because I never met a more positive group of people, so yeah, go dancing, get a nice pair of dancing shoes and take your partner out!! Cuban Fury is in cinemas now www.cubanfury.com