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Ricky Martin’s midcentury Beverly Hills home is all glass, permitting a visitor who has just rung the bell a chance to see him hop joyfully through his cavernous foyer to answer. There’s something undeniably adolescent about his demeanor—like that of a teenager left alone in a grown-up’s house. Throwing open the door, he says hello, and leads me in, past a framed photo on the wall in which he’s full-on mooning the photographer. He’ll tell me later that he keeps in touch with his inner child, but, it seems to me, that child isn’t so inner: It’s right there in front of you, bare butt to the camera.
These are busy times for Martin, who, nearly 25 years after the whirlwind of his “Livin’ la Vida Loca” days, finds himself in the hectic throes of a return to stage and screen. He’s been touring with Pitbull and Enrique Iglesias—“It’s three guys with the attitude of a bullfighter,” he tells me. “Boom, boom, boom!”—and he’s starring this month in the Apple TV+ series Palm Royale, set in 1960s Palm Beach. He plays an ambiguously oriented country--club hand named Robert, and when he talks about the ensemble cast (Kristen Wiig, Carol Burnett, and Laura Dern and her father, Bruce) and the thrill of the big-budget production, he hides his face in his hands in anxious wonderment. You’d think a man of his accomplishments—childhood stardom in the boy band Menudo, over 70 million records sold since—would be past feeling giddy. But he seems preternaturally incapable of being blasé. “They say ‘Action’ and I was nervous,” he tells me. “But you have to go with the flow.”
On set, he reminded himself to stay loose, to improvise. He was alert to what he could pick up from his seasoned costars. “There’s nothing jaded about him,” says Laura Dern. “He was ready to learn at every given moment.”
It’s worth noting that he’s not entirely new to acting. In 2018, Martin appeared in the second season of FX’s American Crime Story—The Assassination of Gianni Versace—playing the fashion designer’s partner, Antonio, and earning an Emmy nomination for his work. Before that, he had a stint in the mid ’90s on General Hospital after becoming a teen star in an Argentine soap. He got diverted when he felt celestial destiny pulling him toward singing. “The first time I was in front of the camera, I said, ‘This is it, this is what I want to do forever,’ ” he says. “With music, I just surfed a wave. It was something uncontrollable.”
Now, in middle age, he might be entering a new phase. To be sure, he does not look like any 52-year-old I’ve ever met, with a youthful visage that only shows wear when a smile draws minuscule wrinkles around his brow. “Someone with that level of charisma—they’re one in a million,” says Abe Sylvia, the creator of Palm Royale, who felt certain of Martin’s enduring magnetism. “He might not have traveled the world doing summer [stock theater], but he has a chemical effect on every environment he walks into. I don’t think you get to be Ricky Martin without a work ethic like his.”
Still, his most consuming job seems to be as a family man. Martin has four children by surrogacy—twin boys he had as a single man in 2008, and a daughter and son born in 2018 and 2019 that he shares with the visual artist Jwan Yosef, to whom he was married for six years. As the two worked through their recent divorce, Martin’s mother, Nereida Morales, started to come from their native Puerto Rico to help Ricky out with the brood. On the day I visit, she is hanging around the kitchen, chatting with one of her grandsons, Matteo, a 15-year-old in gray sweats and floppy hair, parked at the refrigerator hunting for something to eat.
Martin is an active dad. He shuttles his kids to baseball practice and gets chicken nuggets on the dinner table. When we bump into Matteo’s twin, Valentino, playing video games in a den, he bristles at being interrupted, responding with a terse teenage “Leave me alone,” pulling his hoodie up over his head. But, angsty moments aside, it’s impossible to ignore just how powerful a figure Ricky Martin is. “My son was talking about the tour,” he tells me. “He goes, ‘Pitbull says he’s Mr. Worldwide. My father is Mr. Worldwide.’ ”
While many of the new generation of überfamous faces have decamped to places like Calabasas, sealed within the bright heat and broad acreage of the Valley, there’s something classically “You’re a star!” iconic about Martin’s leafy perch in Beverly Hills. He lives above the fray. There is an intimidatingly high hedge that lines his property, and a private security guard driving around the neighborhood.
In ways more than geographical, Martin’s brand of fame is a throwback. Born and raised middle-class in San Juan, he had to cross a sea and a language barrier in order to find his audience, coming up in the studio-system days of celebrity, long before the internet allowed people to gain notoriety on their own. Uploading self-recorded videos to YouTube or building a DIY fan base on social media was never an option. The distribution channels were tightly controlled. But the industry’s star-making power was profound.
In 1984, when he was 12, Martin won a spot with Menudo and for several years was put through a Mouseketeers-style boot camp. The band made him a heartthrob in the Spanish-speaking world and each member of the group was told to compete to see who could get women to shout the loudest. “Who can shake the hips more?” he says, remembering the challenge. For his five-year run with the band, he was crushingly beloved throughout Latin America. “The fame, the money, the screaming girls—it’s something that I really liked,” he says. “I went from living in a world so small—my house was a block away from my school—to walking onto a stage with 200,000 people.”
His transition into an adult star—of almost galactic proportions—was careful, and strategic. Ultimately, his successful “crossover” to English-language audiences put him on a footing worldwide with the biggest stars on the planet, something few Spanish-language artists, if any, had achieved. It began with a performance of his World Cup anthem “La Copa de la Vida” at the 1999 Grammys—a moment that was one of the biggest “star is born” riptides since Elvis appeared on Ed Sullivan. Martin thoroughly stole the show and wowed Madonna, ever attuned to the zeitgeist, who began fawning about him in the press lounge backstage. “That night,” he remembers, “activated everything.”
The next day, Martin was a front-page story, which helped kick off a so-called Latin explosion that also brought Jennifer Lopez and Shakira to the fore, made him a household name as much in Poughkeepsie as in Puerto Rico, and branded him the handsome, happy face of Latin culture. “It’s not that Ricky was [just] known in LA, Miami, New York, Chicago, Dallas. He went to middle America,” he says, adopting the third person to underscore the out-of-body nature of it all. “I had a feast with the entire country. You go to little towns and people would know Ricky Martin.”
Next came the hit that he will never escape, the catchy, cheesy, sublimely engineered “Livin’ la Vida Loca,” an upbeat horn-filled Spanglish earworm that worked on both sides of the language divide. He walked into the studio, heard the demo for the first time, and realized immediately it was the ticket. “There was a higher force of inspiration,” he says. “I knew what I wanted. I wanted the US audience.”
For a brief period at the turn of the century, he was one of the world’s most famous human beings, and something libidinal about him—his hip trembles were talked about like earthquakes—sent hormones racing; to this day, women throw their bras at him onstage. “The power of the hips, right? Those leather pants, man,” he says. He struggles still to understand it. “I was testosteronic, and that triggers fantasies. I really don’t know.”
Martin also possessed a rare sense of discipline and drive for perfection, qualities born of his awareness that he was one of the most visible Latin figures of all time. He felt he had to offer an immaculate image. “I took it as a challenge,” he says. “People would say, ‘Where are you from? Costa Rica?’ And I’m like, ‘No, Puerto Rico.’ ”
The lead single from his next album, a song called “She Bangs,” climbed the charts, but failed to move the needle the way that “Livin’ la Vida Loca” had, and his career never reached those same 1999 heights. “It’s very difficult to repeat,” he says. He got overexposed, to the point that Madonna, not exactly known for reserve, told him to chill out. “She said, ‘Ricky, stop doing interviews, for God’s sake,’ ” he remembers. He became so establishment that he hardened into Y2K amber: He performed at George W. Bush’s 2001 inauguration, teaching the president-elect how to move his hips onstage for a photo op, something he would come to rue. “It was not about politics. I was like, I’m going to be able to represent my Latin community. And those 100 front-cover newspapers the next day were powerful,” he says. “When the Iraq War came, I was like, What’s going on? People ask, Do you regret it? It needed to happen. Would you do it today? No.”
There were other hazards. Most importantly, Martin is gay, which he had admitted as a young adult to his parents but felt he could not tell the world. In 1999, on the razor’s edge of superstardom, even close friends told him, “This is the end of your career if you come out,” he says. “I was the man of the moment with my ‘Livin’ la Vida Loca’ and shaking hips. I was expected to be something.... I was scared.” He had been in a relationship with a man in earlier days, but even that guy knew Martin had bigger fish to fry. “We were 20,” he says. “I told him I’m going to quit everything. Let’s move to Europe and just be. I don’t care about this. He goes, ‘Your path is evident. I see your future. I love you, but we can’t.’ ”
Every gay man knows what it feels like to hide, but Martin was doing so on a scale impossible to comprehend. “There’s no light in the closet. Every time I see an adolescent coming out, I’m like, You’re so lucky, because you don’t have to deal with this ever again,” he says. It stings to this day that he asked family members to keep the secret. “I brought them into this,” he says, his eyes crowning with tears that never quite fall. “I don’t want guilt or shame. Because only if you’re wearing my shoes would you know what I was going through.” Finally, after the birth of his first children, he realized he could not pretend. He published a letter on his website in 2010: “I’m proud to say that I am a fortunate homosexual man.” “It felt amazing. Can you come out twice, three times?” he says. “I wish I had done it before. Yesterday is forever beyond our control. There’s nothing you can do about what we’ve lived.”
Though he still has the polished Colgate smile used so handily on his ascent, now he is looser, and whereas once he tried to hide his private life, now he surprises in how open he is. He’s enjoying being single. He’s not on Tinder or Grindr, he says, but is having fun meeting guys at parties.
In that vein, when I ask him about hints he has dropped that he has a pronounced foot fetish, I expect him to be uncomfortable; instead, he relishes answering. “I love feet. I have a foot thing. I love foot massages, and I would kiss your feet like crazy for hours. But we all have something. Some have a fetish of armpits,” he says. Asked if the photos of his own feet he posts on Instagram are for fans’ enjoyment, he’s quick to confirm. “Let’s open the conversation!” he says. “Let me like this comment that said, ‘I like your feet.’ I have fans that can draw my feet like a piece of art. They write to me: ‘Ricky, I can recognize your feet a mile away.’ ” Imagining the Ricky Martin of 1999 coming close to this candor is not possible, and there’s something gratifying about a star who once kept important truths locked away feeling so wide open he leans into oversharing.
Even when the conversation turns more serious, he doesn’t demur. A lawsuit is lingering in Puerto Rico brought in 2022 by Martin against his nephew that seeks compensation for the reputational harm Martin says he suffered after the man sought a protective order against him and alleged, in part, that the two had a seven-month-long relationship. Martin has staunchly denied his nephew’s claims and the protective order was dismissed after the nephew withdrew his request during a court hearing. When I bring it up, Martin is matter--of-fact. “It’s the worst. The most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. Thank God it was baseless,” he says, seemingly unperturbed by the turbulence, perhaps resigned to its place in his life.
Tucked away on the ground level of his house, Martin keeps a home studio, with walls lined in blue velvet. Sitting with him down here, talking about the past, I realize for a moment the surreal imprint he’s left on so many people of my generation. I was 13 in 1999 and watched TRL—the Ed Sullivan Show of the Y2K era—every day, glued to the fluctuations of the show’s top 10 chart. I was a Britney guy, but Ricky was gargantuan. There was something about him that was undeniably captivating, like a teen-pop version of the green flash at the end of Daisy’s dock. “We always would say when he would come into the trailer, the whole thing would light up,” says his Palm Royale costar Kristen Wiig, describing what makes him riveting. “He’s just the person you want to be with.”
Thanks to the more democratic (although algorithmically rigged in its own way) nature of social media fame, they don’t (or can’t) make glistening beacons like Martin anymore. Maybe they shouldn’t: Ricky is here against the odds, considering what’s happened to others who came up in the same way, namely George Michael, Michael Jackson, and Britney Spears. Stars today are allowed to be messier—think of the proudly queer Lil Nas X giving Satan a lap dance—and the Taylor Swifts and Beyoncés of the world have wrested control and found ways to do fame that work. But I can’t help but wonder if there are struggles, regrets, and wounds underneath the surface of Martin’s veneer. A recent documentary explored the dark side of Menudo, with some members accusing the band’s adult creator of inappropriate behavior, including sexual abuse, though Martin says that was not his experience. “I feel horrible. I don’t know what they went through. It’s not my case,” he says. He says he drew strength from the challenges of those years. “Every phase gave me something that lifted me and didn’t break me.”
He admits that all of this wasn’t easy. “You look back to Elvis. To Jim Morrison. All these legends that aren’t with us,” he says. “It’s a roller coaster at the top. It’s easy to think that you’re God.” He’d escape with trips to India, where he was barely recognized, to backpack by train. But the media glare was persistent: In a Barbara Walters interview in 2000, he gave a defeated nonresponse when asked if he was gay. In retrospect, it’s easy to see that this was invasive, but then, it was the cost of doing business. Walters later said she regretted asking the question, but the damage was done. “I felt violated,” he says. “That gave permission to every journalist to ask, ‘Are you gay?’ I was like, I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want people to know. I don’t know if it’s internalized homophobia, but it was not my moment.” When asked what would’ve happened had he come out back in 1999, his answer is, sadly, maybe correct. “I don’t think [the success] would’ve been the same,” he says. “There is a force that is coming with heavy hate.”
In Martin’s mind, the world is better now, and he’s pleased to say he paved the way. We talk about fellow Puerto Rican Bad Bunny, this generation’s biggest Latin artist, who came to this very Beverly Hills home studio to record music with the OG superstar. Martin takes heart that Bad Bunny has not modulated his image, or even sung in English, to “cross over.” He is exactly who he is, and, from San Juan to Seoul, everyone loves him for it. “They get to be themselves,” says Martin of the new crop like Bad Bunny and J Balvin. “I wish I got that opportunity. But what I had to go through made what’s happening today [possible].” He even presented Bad Bunny a GLAAD award for his proud allyship of the LGBTQ community. Clearly, 1999 this is not.
Settled into an equilibrium, Martin seems to genuinely enjoy his place in the ecosystem; less famous, maybe, but gratified from projects like Palm Royale. “It’s calmer in a good way,” he says. He is the underdog again, a fresh-eyed ingenue happy to be on set. “If I’m presented with a great independent film with a $2 budget, I will go, because I just want any opportunity to act,” he says. He wants film roles and maybe another stint on Broadway, and there is an earnest, sometimes quivering sense of excitement in his voice, like a kid before summer camp, when he discusses what is ahead. This time, anything is possible: Ricky Martin can finally, after all, be anyone he wants to be. Most importantly, he can be Ricky Martin.
Alex Frank is a writer in New York.
A version of this story originally appeared in the March 2024 issue of GQ with the title “The FUll Ricky”
PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Photographs by Eric Ray Davidson
Styled by Brandon Tan
Grooming by Barbara Guillaume using Circa 1970
Tailoring by Alvard Bazikyan
Set design by Allison Freeman
Produced by Annee Elliot Productions, Los Angeles