Renowned Cuban actor Alexis Díaz de Villegas died in Havana last Friday in Havana at the age of 55 after a long battle with lung cancer. He had a prolific career in theater, cinema and television and was considered one of the best actors of his generation. He was best known to international audiences for his title role in the 2010 zombie comedy film Juan of the Dead / Juan de los muertos by Alejandro Brugués.
Díaz de Villegas was born in the central Cuban town of Cumanayagua in the province of Cienfuegos in 1966. His performances in the Cuban theater scene in the late eighties attracted immediate acclaim and he was able to build a robust acting career working in numerous stage plays, winning multiple awards.
Díaz de Villegas film debut was in the 2003 comedy movie Between Two Hurricanes / Entre ciclones by Enrique Colina. He also participated in the omnibus film Tres veces dos by Pavel Giroud, Lester Hamlet, and Esteban Insausti, in Juan Carlos Tabío’s Horn of Plenty / El cuerno de la abundancia (2008), Enrique Pineda Barnet’s La anunciación (2008), Rogelio Paris’ Kangamba (2009), and Esteban Insausti’s Larga distancia.
In 2011, he played the title role of Juan in Brugués’ international hit Juan of the Dead. The film follows a slacker who has never managed to get a grip on his life until a zombie invasion takes over Havana, and he finds a unique opportunity to become a zombie killer-for-hire until it becomes more evident that the only way out is to leave the island altogether. The horror comedy played at numerous international film festivals, winning the Best Film Award at the Panama Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Miami International Film Festival, and was the winner of Spain’s Goya Award for Best Ibero-American Film.
Other Díaz de Villegas’ film titles include the Canadian-American biographical movie Papa Hemingway in Cuba (2015) by Bob Yari; the French-language Canadian black comedy All You Can Eat Buddha by Ian Lagarde; the Cuban-Japanese historical drama Ernesto (2017) by Junji Sakamoto; the Italian-Cuban co-production movie Havana Kyrie (2020) by Paolo Consorti; and the Canadian drama Skin (2022) by Filomena Guarasci. Díaz de Villegas had two films in the pipeline at the time of his death: Malos padres by José Ramon Alama and Insular by Héctor Valdez, both which are in post-production stages and should be eventually released.
