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.’ ”
