With his versatile empathy and soulful, broken face, Javier Bardem has become one of Spain’s most respected movie stars.
Hailing from a long line of actors, he made lots of naughty movies in the flush of artistic freedom that followed the death of dictator Francisco Franco, went on to become the first Spaniard nominated for a best-actor Academy Award (“Before Night Falls”) and further impressed with challenging, carefully chosen roles in the likes of “The Sea Inside,” “Collateral” and “Goya’s Ghosts.” Now, Bardem is dropping the biggest double whammy of his career.
He plays Anton Chigurh in Joel and Ethan Coen’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s acclaimed novel “No Country for Old Men” (opening Friday in Denver). The character is a literal embodiment of death who heartlessly, yet with his own peculiar sense of purpose, stalks the West Texas border region, methodically doling out destruction in the wake of a drug deal gone bad.
The 38-year-old actor can be seen as another literary icon, though one who could not be further opposite of Chigurh. He’s gentle, love-addled Florentino Ariza, the Colombian protagonist of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Mar-
quez’s “Love in the Time of Cholera” (also opening Friday in Denver), whose 50-year devotion to a married woman that he cannot have leads him into hundreds of short, sweet and meaningless affairs.
It’s quite a gamut, to say the least. And one that’s been very impressively run.
Q: Chigurh is almost like a supernatural force. Talk about making such a character believable.
A: We all know that, no matter how evil you have to portray somebody, there always has to be room for humanity. Otherwise, you cannot relate to him as an audience, and it’s like watching Superman or the Terminator. You go, “OK, he’s a machine, right.” Which in this case was quite difficult, because he is a machine, in a way, but with his own principles and codes. … I just made him out-of-sync, made it a problem for him to make real connections with people.
Q: How much did his stupid haircut help? Or hinder?
A: I heard that it came from a book Tommy Lee (Jones) gave the Coens, with great photographs of dark places in Texas and New Mexico back in the 1960s – dive bars, whorehouses – and some customers of those places had that haircut. When I saw it, I was like, “Thank you, my friends, you already gave me 50 percent of the character.” It was truly helpful, but not for my private life.
Q: What do you think “No Country” is saying about violence, especially through your character?
A: The question is, is it really justifiable, violence? And the answer is no. I mean, we all have dreamt or fantasized about killing somebody. But we have common sense, and the thing that makes us different from the animals is that we can control ourselves and have reason to say, “No, that would be a mistake.” Some people cannot manage that. And some people with a lot of power, like presidents of countries, can justify violence as a method of resolving things. I think the point of the movie is that violence doesn’t get you anywhere. There’s a lot of violence, but all it brings is violence himself, my character.
Q: Did you ever dream of killing the guy who broke your nose when you were younger?
A: Ha! That fight lasted a few minutes. I was 18 years old, and it came out of nowhere. Basically, I was in a place and a guy just felt like having fun with me, and apparently he did because he really broke my face. I didn’t remember his face because he was like a flash, came at me sideways. But for some time, I would imagine seeing his face, I was seeing his face in everybody for the next three months. “That’s the guy! No, that’s the guy!” Did I dream of killing him? Yes, in a way you wanted him to disappear.
But you wanted him to disappear before the action happened. You wanted him to never have been born.
Q: “Cholera” must have been a welcome change from “Old Men.”
A: It was a fresh shower. I remember the moment when I got off the plane in Cartagena, Colombia. There was the color, the heat, the people, the races there, the sensuality – it was like, “Wow, man!” My heart burst wide open. It was like, “Come to life.”
Q: Any trepidation about adapting such an honored work of literature?
A: Of course. You can avoid facing the responsibility of bringing that masterpiece of a novel to the screen and knowing that no movie in the world would ever match the book. But … I think you can capture very well the essence of the novel. I thought it could be a good chance to bring people to the novel through the movie.
