Why Enrique Iglesias Is Still Hot

On a
recent November night, the crowd inside Madison Square Garden swelled to
Taylor Swift or Lady Gaga capacity, but the main attraction was from a
different era: the ’90s. Believe it or not, Enrique Iglesias is still
going strong. His ninth album, Euphoria, shot to the top of the charts last year, with four No. 1 singles and collaborations from Pitbull and nicole scherzinger. He sat in as a guest judge on The X Factor. He spent Thanksgiving shimmying with Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders
at the team’s halftime show. His latest tour is one of the most
successful of the year, with 630,000 tickets sold and $1.8 million in
merchandising alone.





He’s
outlasted Ricky Martin, the Backstreet Boys, ’N Sync, and the Spice
Girls. It’s not just his voice or his songs that make his groupies
swoon, but his touch. At Madison Square Garden, a lucky dude is invited
onstage to drink rum and reminisce with the singer. An even luckier girl
is called onstage for a kiss—on the lips. She crawls inside his shirt
and gropes him, to deafening hoots.


How did he come up with this
routine? “A routine for me is exactly the same with the same person, and
you know how it’s going to go,” Iglesias says a week later in a phone
interview. “I remember growing up and watching Bruce Springsteen or Tom
Petty or Bono, some of these acts that were unpredictable. They would
bring someone onstage, and you never knew how that person was going to
react. You could tell it wasn’t rehearsed. Sometimes it would go well, sometimes it doesn’t.”


But Tom Petty never kissed a girl like that. Doesn’t his girlfriend mind?

“She never gives me a hard time,” says Iglesias, who has been dating the tennis star Anna Kournikova since 2001.


Most musicians don’t normally stay
with the same woman for a decade, but Iglesias isn’t afraid of time. At
35, he looks not a day older than when he debuted his first
English-language album in 1999, as the youngest son of Julio Iglesias.
Onstage, he wears a white T-shirt and pair of baggy jeans (“I wear so
much G-Star, I should be the promoter”). His face is as smooth as Justin
Bieber’s. His arms are perfectly sculpted, even though he insists he
doesn’t live at the gym. “I work out like once a week,” he says. “But
you would laugh at my workout. I’ll pick up a dumbbell and do 10 reps,
and then I’m like, OK, that’s it.”






Carlo Allegri / AP Photos


He attributes his youthfulness to his mother, the Filipina socialite Isabel Preysler.
“My mom is 59 and she looks unbelievable,” he says, “and my mom always
used to say, ‘When you mix races, the kids are stronger, tougher, and
age better.’ My brother is two years older than me—he’s 37—and he looks
27.” Iglesias would like to have kids, but he says he doesn’t know if he
has the patience for them, especially when he sees kids crying at a
restaurant. He recently texted Usher and was surprised to find him awake
at 6 a.m., being a dad. “I think 35 is kind of young to have kids
nowadays,” Iglesias says.


He’s found a similar fountain of
youth in his work, in his sound, which has stayed current while most of
his contemporaries have fallen off the radar. Iglesias is something of
an anomaly, a male solo pop singer in an industry now dominated by women
such as Katy Perry and Rihanna.
He’s sold 60 million albums, and he holds international appeal from
England to Australia. (His record label says he’s the most successful
artist of all time in India.) But in the United States, as late as 2007,
he was fading. As some of his albums were underperforming, Iglesias
felt bored. “We kept having hits outside the U.S.,” says his manager, Fernando Giaccardi. “It all comes down to song. Enrique is a firm believer in that.”

“You would laugh at my workout. I’ll pick up a dumbbell and do 10 reps, and then I’m like, OK, that’s it.”

Iglesias recorded a song called “I
Like It,” with a speedier melody than his previous hits. “I think when
you’ve had successes and failures, you’ve been up and you’ve been down,
you think, ‘Who the hell cares?’” he says. His label hated it. But
Iglesias was so certain that it would be a hit, he personally lobbied
Interscope boss Jimmy Iovine. “I was willing to kill for this song,”
Iglesias says. “I knew that song was amazing. I wouldn’t listen to it
for three months and then I’d play it, and it would still give me a good
vibe.”