The full Ricky

Twenty-five years after becoming one of the most staggeringly famous men on the planet, a wiser, more assured Ricky Martin is taking another run at being a star. While also being himself, this time.

- By Alex Frank. Photographs by Eric Ray Davidson

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.”