Early on during the filming of No Country For Old Men, the Coen brothers’ bleak but brilliant thriller, their star, Javier Bardem, felt the need to point out that he wasn’t, perhaps, the best choice to play the ruthless killer. “There was a day when I had to take a car, drive it, stop, say a few lines, then shoot somebody,” recalls Bardem in an accent heavy with his Madrileño roots. “I said to them, ‘What am I doing here, man? I mean, I don’t drive – I haven’t even got a driver’s licence – my English is pretty bad, I hate guns and I don’t like violence.’ They were really laughing, but I said, ‘Listen, we’ve got a problem here.’”

Fortunately, the Coens, Joel and Ethan, co-creators of offbeat, innovative cinema like Blood Simple, The Big Lebowski, Fargo and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, reassured Bardem that they knew exactly what they were doing. The result is a classic that may be the best film they have made. And Bardem, complete with the naffest pudding-bowl haircut seen for many a year, proves to be terrifying as Chigurh, a murderer who will decide a victim’s fate on the flip of a coin.

“Yes, shows what I know, right?” he laughs. “I’ve heard talk about Oscars and it’s impossible not to think about it. But it becomes this thing that doesn’t really have anything to do with you.” Bardem has been down this particular road before, with a series of performances that have seen the 38-year-old Spaniard – for years a major star in the Spanish-speaking world – garner both an international art-house following and a growing buzz in Hollywood. In 2001, Bardem was the first Spanish actor to be nominated for an Academy Award for his portrayal in Before Night Falls of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, who was persecuted by the Castro regime for being homosexual. In 2005, Mar adentro (The Sea Inside), in which he played quadriplegic Ramón Sampredro, who challenged the Spanish legal system for the right to die, won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.

Bardem works hard to balance that showbusiness life with quality time with friends and family – which must be especially important when some of the best directors in the world are beating a path to your door. He went straight from playing the sinister Chigurh on the bone-dry Texan plains to the lush terrain of Colombia for Love in the Time of Cholera, British director Mike Newell’s screen version of Gabriel Garcia Márquez’s novel, playing the lovesick Florentino.

“As much as Chigurh is the ultimate icon of violence, Florentino is the ultimate icon of love,” he says. “Sometimes being romantic is not the best option, because it is kind of like a poison and doesn’t allow you to be real, here and now. He’s a symbolic figure of love which actually I don’t agree with. But I was desperate to play this guy. I first read the book when I was 14 and I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve read it since.”

Still, going from killer to idealised lover was a jolt. “It was crazy and I wouldn’t normally do that, but they were both so good I couldn’t help it. When I finished Cholera I was broken. I needed a break. And I know people go, ‘Come on, there are harder jobs’, and of course, there are, but there are not many jobs where you have to put your emotional life out there every day. After I’d finished, I just went back to Madrid, and you have to find yourself again – go for a coffee with friends, walk in the park.”

We meet twice. The first time is in Cannes, during the festival, where No Country For Old Men has just received a rapturous welcome. “It’s good, right?”, he asks, as if needing reassurance. When I see him months later, in London, Bardem is holed up in a Soho hotel for a day of interviews. He’s dressed in jeans, a brown T-shirt and trainers. He’s a big man, more than 6ft tall and rather burly, with an imposing physical presence that for years he hurled around the rugby field.

“I started playing when I was nine,” he says. “I loved it. I played until I was 24. I was a prop – big neck! I stopped because it was getting a little ridiculous. The ball would be over there [waves his arm to the right] and the players from the other team would still be coming for me. It was like, ‘Ah. OK. You’ve seen a couple of the movies, right?’” He was good, too, and played for the Spanish national team, though, “That’s a bit like saying you’re a bullfighter in Japan”, he quips. “I learnt a lot from rugby. It’s a team game and you have to work together. It’s like that on a film set.” That bashed-up nose, you might assume, was the result of an injury on the field. Not so. Some ten years ago he was attacked in a Madrid nightclub. “No provocation,” he says. “A guy asked me my name and then he hit me. I’d never seen him before.”

Bardem was born on the Canary Islands 38 years ago, but raised, the youngest of three, in the Spanish capital. His mother, Pilar Bardem, is a respected actress and separated from his father, Carlos Encinas, when their youngest son was a baby. “I was raised by my mother and sister. I owe a lot to that, because it gave me a way of understanding women’s behaviour from a different point of view. I love the sensibility of women and I appreciate them. Some men want women, but they don’t like them or know them.”

At school, he wasn’t particularly academic, preferring instead to play sport and, occasionally, act. “I was a very bad student and I'm not proud of that. Now that I have the chance to read for pleasure and for knowledge, because you are sometimes obliged to read things for a role and it opens a door for you and you go, ‘F***! How good is that?’”

His uncle is director Juan Antonio Bardem, his grandfather is actor Rafael Bardem, and his brother Carlos and his sister Monica are actors, too. So perhaps it was inevitable that Bardem would follow in the “tradition”, but at first he resisted the call. As a teenager he went to art college, paying his way with a series of odd jobs, including once working as a stripper. “Yeah, but it was only one day. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of talking about it years later and my mother and sister read the article,” he laughs. “You talk about showing your ass and then your mother reads all about it.”

He also earned money by working as an extra on film sets and then, at 20, the director Bigas Luna, offered him a speaking part in the film Las Edades de Lulú (The Ages of Lulu). “I talked to my mother and she said, ‘Well, if you are going to do it, do it well and prepare yourself, because this is not a joke…’ I got into acting school and I found myself immersed in the pleasure of researching in order to create a fiction. I realised there was something about that which helped me to express myself through the characters, and it was in the blood, I guess. I don’t think I could do anything else.”

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