When he was 13 years old, Gael García Bernal starred in a telenovela called El Abuelo y Yo (My Grandparents and I). Born in Guadalajara, Mexico, the child of theatre actors, he had been on stage since he was a year old, but this was his first taste of real fame. One scene became a national talking point because of how young he was. In it, the wide-eyed Bernal, a long strand of chestnut hair hanging down over his improbably pretty face, kisses a girl his age with a hesitant rawness that tells you this means more to him than anything else in the world.

A decade later, another kiss made him famous not just in his own country but across the globe. In 2001’s Y Tu Mamá También (And Your Mother Too), Bernal and Diego Luna came together with a drunken intensity that ignited a debate about sexuality in Mexico and brought the world’s cinematic attention to the Latin American country.

Bernal had box-office good looks, but he was also capable of being both impish and wholehearted. He was on his way to movie stardom even before he finished his studies at Central School of Speech and drama (where he was the first Mexican to be accepted). “In order to do Amores Perros,” Bernal tells me today, at home in Argentina, “I had to skip some time at drama school, so the director Alejandro González Iñárritu came up with a great Latin American solution, which was to say I had a tropical disease and had to stay in Mexico for a while. Everyone believed me.”

Official trailer of The Burning.

Now 36, Bernal lives alone in Palermo, an upscale but still hip area of Buenos Aires. Among movie lovers at least, he is arguably his country’s most recognisable face, thanks to the electric emotion he has brought to films such as Amores Perros, Bad Education and The Motorcycle Diaries. He also seems like a lot of fun.

In his latest film, The Burning (El Ardor), he plays Kai, a mysterious being of few words who emerges from the Argentinian rainforest to rescue Tania (Alice Braga), a young woman kidnapped by mercenaries. What’s particularly unexpected is that this is an action movie that sees the usually thoughtful actor go full Rambo, rushing barefoot and topless through the jungle, hurling homemade spears at his enemies and choking a man to death.

Bernal laughs when I say this feels like a departure for him. “It was definitely a new experience,” he laughs. “It wasn’t easy. It was really, really cold in that jungle and I was outside all day trying to do all these action things without any shoes on.”

It started with a kiss: with Maribel Verdú in Y Tu Mamá También (2001). Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd/Allstar

If pulling a John McClane is new territory for him, then the subject matter behind The Burning, directed by the Argentine Pablo Fendrik, is very familiar. Bernal likes to choose films with a strong political message – his last project was Jon Stewart’s Rosewater –and here, the backdrop is land grabbing and the exploitation of the jungle for commercial gain. Fendrik has playfully flipped the Western genre on its head by setting his film in the South American jungle and changing its priorities from the colonising of wild land to the preservation of it.

“There’s a real connection between some of the human revolutionaries I’ve played, like Che Guevara, and Kai, but the difference is that he believes human beings don’t belong in the jungle,” says Bernal. The climactic scene, in which Kai and his nemesis don cowboy scarves to conduct a duel, is an homage to Sergio Leone that is both intense and tongue-in-cheek.

Bernal may have worried, on the banks of the Parana River in northeastern Argentina, about the state of his cut-up feet, but he doesn’t come across as the kind of actor who’d have an on-set meltdown about varieties of salad. He could have taken those good looks, which have barely changed over the years, climbed aboard the Hollywood gravy train and never looked back, but instead he has chosen to make, for the most part, Latin American films. Not just as an actor, Bernal is also a producer, writer and director, bringing zeal to a range of politically charged human-interest stories.

Age of innocence: a young Gael Garcia Bernal in the Mexican soap opera El Abuelo y Yo (The Grandfathers and I). Photograph: Supplied by Landmark Media

“The stories I like to do, these stories of resistance, are often very old fashioned,” Bernal says. “People have been stealing each other’s land and others have been trying to say ‘no’ to them since the beginning of time.”

It can be hard to take the idea of a politically engaged actor seriously, but Bernal is unpretentiously chatty and well informed. Part of this, he thinks, is down to his heritage. “Politics is much more part of everyday life in Latin America. In Mexico audiences want to see a big discussion around a film – what we expect from Hollywood films worldwide is more of an entertaining show. Y Tu Mamá También was a road movie and comedy, but it had a very strong political connotation that sparked a discussion in Mexico that is still going on. I feel like a similar kind of film made in the United States might just be forgotten.”

When I ask him if he has more freedom making a film in Latin America than in the US, he answers without hesitation. “Absolutely. There’s no comparison. You feel free. You are free to do whatever you want.” This, plus the longer afterlife that films now have thanks to on-demand streaming, means he feels “the responsibility is on us, the people making the film, to make it well”.

‘Making films in Latin America there’s no comparison. You feel free’: arriving at the Academy Awards in Los Angeles, 2014. Photograph: Stewart Cook/Rex Features

These days Bernal divides his time between Buenos Aires and Mexico City and has two young children, a son called Lázaro and a daughter called Libertad. As of last year, he is no longer with their mother, the Argentine actor Dolores Fonzi, but there seems to be little acrimony in their break-up. Being a father has, he says, “changed me on so many levels that I haven’t even caught up with it. So many things have happened – all for the better. I’m worried and nervous [as a father] but I’m comforted by the fact that they have their own subjectivity, which I don’t. I also have to remember that they have been born into a different time. Their world is so much more connected than mine was when I was growing up and, to be honest, they are doing things I wish I could have done…”

The films that Bernal has made in recent years – dealing with migration crises, the desperate plight of indigenous peoples, the destruction of natural habitats – are the kinds of films most leading men only do once in a while. There’s more money and an easier time to be had elsewhere. Bernal is different. He’s looking to be wholly fulfilled and seems to bring the same passionate, watchful openness that was written all over the face of the young boy from the telenovela to everything he does.

“I feel very hopeful and naively optimistic for the future,” he says, speaking about the world his children will grow up in. It’s an apt description of the man himself.

The Burning is out on 19 June