Antonio Banderas, casual in a long-sleeve T and olive cargo pants, is being bad. He is in the middle of a long press day, talking to one reporter after another about his role as the suave (if hairball-hacking) Puss In Boots in Shrek the Third, which opened Friday.

He has barely had time for a bathroom break. Much less a smoking break. He emerges from the small conference room at the Mandarin Oriental off Brickell with an American Spirit cigarette in hand.

But he learns there's no time for him to make his way outside for a proper smoke. So he lights up right there, in an airless upstairs lobby. Nobody calls him on the smoking. But then a photographer beckons, and a handler quickly makes the cigarette disappear.

As you walk back into the conference room with him, you notice he has a new cigarette. He fingers it longingly. You take pity and tell him to go ahead and light it. Sure, we're in a windowless room where it's against the law to be smoking, and the hotel staff would cringe if they knew. But Banderas seems hard-up.

"I am only smoking because you have given me permission to do so," he says, deep voice working the Spanish accent. Now that he is 46 and beginning to gray, he is even hotter than he was in those smoldering Almodovar roles. And he knows it.

Even when he's just talking about an animated cat, he fixes intense brown eyes on you, the voice dropping and dropping until it doesn't matter what he's saying. You're good with just sitting there and taking in the drama.

ONE COOL CAT

"There is lots of interaction between the cat and Donkey in this movie. Both are solitary characters. They don't have backgrounds. They don't have families," Banderas says so ardently you wonder if he isn't overdoing it just a tad. "Though Donkey married this dragon, he is still solitary and jealous that I may still be the favorite of Shrek's. The cat is smoother, smarter. He never looks at himself in the mirror. He doesn't know he is a cat. He doesn't know he is a cute little thing. He thinks he is 6 feet tall and speaks with this arrogance."

Puss is also a player, of course.

"He has too many girlfriends. That creates a problem for him in this movie. He leads a secret life. It is always bad to be a womanizer," Banderas says.

It's still trippy, he says, to watch Puss on the big screen.

"When you are recording the voice, there is a camera in front of you. The animators then watch the tapes and use your gestures. It's a freakish experience when you sit in the theater and you see your alter ego with the face of a cat doing gestures that you recognize of yourself."

SERIOUS BUSINESS

You might be tempted to dismiss the Shrek franchise as cartoons for the kids, but the DreamWorks animations featuring a sweet, overgrown green ogre who manages to win the affections of the lovely Princess Fiona are serious business, making $1.4 billion in box office receipts. The first Shrek won an Oscar for Best Animated Feature in 2002.

Banderas says he was a fan even before he joined the cast in Shrek 2.

"I saw it at the Cannes Film Festival. The audiences went from watching some very thick and complex movies, and all of a sudden they are thrown a movie like this -- and they erupt in laughter. Shrek is very countercultural. It takes characters that the Disney factory has treated in a melodramatic way, corny if you want, and gives us the possibility of laughing at ourselves."

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