David Villalpando

Watch Enrique Xuncax talk. In El Norte (1983) his sister Rosa, played by Zaide Silvia Gutiérrez, has a watching face that gives little away, and David Villalpando's Enrique is the opposite: quicker, prouder, a boy who believes what he has been told about the North and says so. He had come to Gregory Nava's film from the stage, where he had played more than 1,500 performances of El Extensionista, and stage habits are usually the first thing a camera catches. It catches none here. He told an interviewer at the time that he had always had an audience reacting to him and that on the film he "had to learn how to make loving statements to the camera". Whatever that meant to him, it worked.

We should own what the film did to us. The Guatemalan opening is as good as anything made about migration, and the crossing left us shaking, and a good part of the reason is that Villalpando had spent the first hour making us believe Enrique's confidence. The film needs someone who has swallowed the promise whole so that it has something to take away from him, and he gives it that without once signalling that he knows what is coming. Our review found Nava earnest, sometimes clumsy, too willing to let the score do the telling. Villalpando is none of those things.

Then, as far as cinema is concerned, almost nothing. There are supporting parts in The Arrival (1996), John Sayles's Men with Guns (1997), Álex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango (1997) and The Mask of Zorro (1998), where the credits list him as Skinny and, in the last, as Stupid Soldier. We have not reviewed them and will not pretend to judge them. The career he actually built was in Mexican television, as an actor, writer and director of comedy, most recognisably as Profesor Virolo, the inept school director of Cero en conducta (1999), much of it alongside Jorge Ortiz de Pinedo, and later directing episodes of Una familia de diez. The actor who learned to be small for the camera went back to being large for a studio audience, and made a living at it for decades.

British viewers will mostly know him for one film, and we cannot vouch for the rest. But he has kept working with Gutiérrez since El Norte, and if either of them is ever handed a part of that size again we would like to be told. Until then, watch the one. Watch him in the first hour, before the crossing, while Enrique still thinks he knows how the story ends.