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Javier Bardem Breaks Big
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The movie, directed by the incomparable Joel and Ethan Coen, comes from a novel by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Cormac McCarthy. The film has generated awards buzz ever since it was a contender for the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival last spring. Fans seem pretty eager, too; one recent post on an Internet Movie Database message board is titled: “Have you ever been more excited for a movie?”
Speaking from his home in Madrid, Bardem says he simply couldn’t turn down a chance to work with the Coen brothers, an experience he describes as one of his career highlights. “For me, the Coens are two of the best screenwriters and directors,” he says, adding that the moviemakers helped him find the essential tics and traits of a character who is far beyond sinister.
“In this character, you can barely see a human being in there. He’s like a machine of violence,” Bardem says. “It was quite challenging, because you don’t have many human elements to hold on to. But you go there and do what you’re supposed to do, which is trying to create some empathy for the character. It’s hard, because you always want your characters to be welcomed by the audience, and that’s not the case in this movie. You have to be that psychopath, with no excuses.”
Brolin says there aren’t many actors like his No Country for Old Men co-star: “Javier has an uncanny ability to transform himself into whatever is most affective for his roles. Vanity in his performances is nonexistent… There isn’t another actor out there that can match his thoughtfulness personally and his imagination creatively.”
To be Florentino, the long-suffering romantic in Love in the Time of Cholera, Bardem had only to summon the memories of the first time he read the book—and the many times he returned to it after.
“I read the novel when I was a teenager, and even though I was quite young, it made an impression on me,” Bardem recalls. “After that I read it three more times. When they came to me about making the movie I was very excited about the idea, but frightened of how the adaptation would be. To be able to portray any novel on-screen, that’s impossible. But the adaptation did a great job of getting the flavor of the novel in my opinion. You can see that they captured what was inside the novel really well.”
Though Bardem read the novel several more times in preparation for the role, “once I started shooting I put it away… I stopped looking at it because I thought that once you’re trying to construct a character, you cannot rely too heavily on how the author described that character. At the end of the day, when they say ‘Action,’ you have to go with your own ideas. It’s great to know what the author has done with a character, but you have to build it by your own instinct.”
A combination of intelligence and instinct has always fueled Bardem’s most memorable performances. “He is one of the best actors that is walking on the earth,” says Julian Schnabel, who directed Bardem in his Oscar-nominated turn in Before Night Falls. “I think he works as hard as anybody I’ve ever met in my life.”
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This story was published in the Fall 2007 MovieMaker Magazine. The headline was:
Bardem Breaks Big
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