Edgar Ramirez has revealed for the first time that he was once kidnapped and held at bay by his takers with machine guns.
While chatting with Nicole Kidman for Interview Magazine, “The Undoing” star spoke candidly about growing up in “the narco-terrorism of Pablo Escobar” in Bogota, Colombia.
“I mean, friends of mine have been killed, and I was kidnapped myself once, and the thought I had was, ‘I won’t be able to see the people I love if I don’t survive this,'” he said. “I was kidnapped, like in a movie. With submachine guns.”
Edgar, 43, said he was held for about three hours, adding, “the first time that I’ve shared this.”
His job may have kept him alive.
“At the time, though, when they found out that it was me, that I was an actor—well, it was a flipped coin,” he said. “Thankfully what happened, was they said, ‘No, this guy’s too big for us to hide him, so let’s just let him go.'”
The actor didn’t give more details about the time or place.
“The worst thing about being kidnapped is not the violence or the fear of getting killed, it’s the arrogance,” he said of the experience. “The assumption that your life belongs to them, that from that moment on, you’re not in charge of your own decisions. That your life does not belong to you. That’s why I don’t take anything for granted.”
The Emmy-nominated star and his family moved to Bogota for his father’s work. Edgar was 5 at the time.
“We had bomb threats every month,” he said while discussing his schooling. “As a 5-year-old, you don’t understand the gravity of the issue. But what I do remember is that every time I said goodbye to my mom, and I thought about the possibility of a bomb going off there in the bus, or that school, my thought was not about me dying, it was about not seeing my mom again: ‘If I die today, I won’t be able to come back in the afternoon and have lunch with her.’ That was my fear.”
Because of his upbringing and his experiences, Edgar hasn’t been able to play a drug lord in film, an offer he’s gotten “countless times.”
“It’s not a political reason. Of course, there’s something artistic to be discovered in characters like that, and I have friends who’ve played them beautifully,” he said. “But for me, it’s very personal. My father’s best friend was killed by Pablo Escobar.”
