His big break came with Luna in Jamón, jamón, a madcap comedy
with Bardem as a hunk hired to lure a girl away from the man she plans to
marry. It could have led to many roles where Bardem was little more than eye
candy. “After Jamón, jamón, it was like, ‘OK, this is
not the way I want it to work…’ I’m proud of that film, but there was a
moment when they were asking me to play the same thing over and over again.”
Instead, he chose his roles carefully, working with directors such as Pedro
Almodóvar (Live Flesh) and Milos Foreman (Goya’s Ghosts),
building up a considerable reputation inside as well as outside Spain. “I
like contradictions in a character,” he says. “Maybe because I’m a
contradictory person. I think that life is about solving contradictions that
come along and feeling comfortable in the middle.”
Some characters are so vivid that they change you, he says, at least for a
while. His remarkable performance in The Sea Inside provoked a heated
debate about euthanasia in Spain and made him face up to his own mortality.
“I was only about 35, and I don’t have any plans to die very soon, please
God, but we were talking about dying so much every day that it became
something that I related to in a different way than I do now.”
He prefers to describe himself as a jobbing actor and not a star – even
though, along with his friend Penélope Cruz and Antonio Banderas, Bardem is
something of a national obsession in Spain. “We all like success,” he says.
“And this job sometimes allows for you to be awarded love – ‘We like you! We
love your work!’ But if you buy into all that it’s dangerous, because you
are looking for it all the time. The most important thing is to do the job.
I saw my mom, a huge theatre actress, unemployed for years, and that’s why I
don’t buy into the shiny stuff, the gold – if it happens, great, but
tomorrow somebody could say ‘I’m tired of him, hire somebody else.’”
This is an unlikely scenario. Bardem is at the top of his game – he’s finished
a film for Woody Allen, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, with Cruz and
Scarlett Johansson – and in the new year, is due to start Tetro
with Francis Ford Coppola. “These are directors I grew up admiring. Can you
imagine how it feels to be asked to work with them?”
No Country for Old Men was a long and, at times, lonely shoot, he
admits. “It was three months in Texas, shooting one or two days a week, and
with that f****** haircut, it was like, ‘What am I doing here?’ The Coens
and the crew made me welcome, but I was a long way from home.” Based on
Cormac McCarthy’s novel, No Country for Old Men is a postmodern
western and thriller. When Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is out hunting in the
desert, he stumbles across the scene of a drugs deal gone horrifically
wrong. When Moss discovers packages of heroin and $2.4 million, he decides
to take the cash. That sets off a chain of violence as the police, headed by
Sheriff Bell (Tommy Lee Jones), try to find him before the gang boss,
Chigurh, does.
Bardem agonised over the part, because he was anxious about playing a
character who embodies violence. “You notice the difference in culture
between America and Europe. There was one day when I had to do a scene
naked, and between takes I was wandering around with my ass out, looking at
the monitor, and there was always somebody putting a coat or a blanket over
me. And the day I was killing people they were like, ‘Yaah! That was good!’
I know I don’t have a nice ass, but I would go for an ass over killing
people every time.
“I enjoy movies, but when there is violence in movies I have my reservations.
It’s like, what kind of impact will this have on people? But I read the
script and it’s actually talking about the nature of violence itself – about
the unbearable effects it has. And I thought if anybody could pull that off,
it’s the Coens.” And Bardem met McCarthy on set and liked him. “Really nice,
so nice you have to wonder where all that violence comes from.”
Bardem has no plans to leave Spain for Hollywood. “I like the way people
behave in my country. It’s about being open to life instead of being
obsessed about getting somewhere. There’s a moment when they put the worries
about paying the bills to one side and just live. In some countries, it’s
all about being number one and if you are second you are a failure.”
His life there is conducted, as much as possible, away from the glare of the
paparazzi. The very mention of the Spanish tabloids brings forth an
untypical outburst from him. “I consider myself a peaceful soul, but there’s
one thing that sends me out of my mind, and that’s the violation, to feel
ethically raped, by this kind of press and sometimes that puts me in a place
I don’t like.”
But his life there is rich – there’s a girlfriend of several years, Cristina,
a language teacher, and he owns two restaurants in Madrid, a tapas bar
called Bardemcilla (Little Bardem), and Corazon Loco (Crazy Heart). He
regrets, though, the distortion that fame brings to his life. “The more you
are known the worse an actor you become. My job is based on people’s
behaviour and the fact is it’s not possible for me to sit down at a café in
Spain and simply watch people, because they are looking at me.” He gets
around that by sometimes adopting a disguise so that he can walk the
streets. “Yes, I’ll do that now and again,” he says. “Maybe I should have
kept the haircut.”
Ah yes, the haircut. In No Country for Old Men, Bardem sports the kind
of haircut that could ruin reputations. “When I spoke to the hairdresser on
set he said, ‘Don’t worry, I know what to do’, and then it was snip, snip,
snip and I got up and went to see the Coens and they just started laughing
again, I mean, really crying. And I looked into the mirror and it was like,
‘Oh s***! What have they done?’”
But the strange thing is that the daft barnet just adds to the menace of the
character. Chigurh, in Bardem’s expert hands, is terrifying, one of the best
screen villains for years. In the end, he just had to trust the Coens,
because they knew all along that he was the right man for the job. He
usually is.
No Country for Old Men is released on January 18
