Antonio Banderas has shared where he stands with his ex-wife, fellow Hollywood star, Melanie Griffith, calling her one of his "best friends" over a decade after their divorce.
In an interview with People, The Mask of Zorro star revealed that the pair continue to share a close “healthy” relationship, describing the Working Girl actress as "if not my best friend, one of my best friends".
He added, "When I go to Los Angeles, we get together anyway; we have a lot of fun. We laugh and we just... It’s a very healthy thing, and it was very healthy for our kids."
The starry couple were married between 1996 and 2015, welcoming their daughter Stella in 1996. Antonio also became a stepfather to Melanie's daughter, Fifty Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson, from her previous marriage to actor Don Johnson and her son, Alexander Bauer, who she had with second husband Steven Bauer.
For Antonio, the secret to staying on such good terms with his ex-wife comes down to one thing - sincerity. He explained, "The thing is that when we were a couple, when we separated, we were always very sincere.
"We came out of our relationship in a nice way that was very important for [the kids] and for us.” Antonio also credited Melanie for keeping the blended family together, calling her "an unbelievable mother".
Apart from an interview a couple of years after the split, Melanie has kept her life rather private. In 2017, she told Net-a-Porter magazine that the split came because she felt “stuck.”
She said, "Nobody else is to blame. It's just that I personally got stuck and I won't let that happen again. I want to enjoy life, I want to do whatever I want to do."
At the time, she added "I'm shy with men now, very reticent. I haven't met anyone in the almost two years I have been divorced. I don't go on dates, nobody has asked me on a date. I go out with my girlfriends."
In 2019, four years after their split, Antonio declared that he would always love Melanie. He told People, “Melanie is not my wife anymore, but I think she is my best friend. I love her and will love her until the day I die. She’s my family.”
He also offered a rare look at their family dynamic, and how naturally becoming a stepfather was. "I was there because I love their mother and I am totally taken with their mother and they were the most important part of what she came with.
"Very soon they understood that. They called me Paponio, a mixture between Papa and Antonio."
Elsewhere in his new interview, Antonio talked about learning to cherish the “experience of living” nearly a decade after his 2017 heart attack. “It was like somebody put glasses on me so I could see the reality that I didn’t see before.
"I was just too worried about stupid things. We sometimes forget that we are going to die. People live like they are not going to die. They collect things and they collect. I don’t want to collect anything. I want to just experience."
