Words: Jonathan Wells
Photography: Penélope Cruz
Styling: Zak Maoui
When he’s at his most menacing, there’s a certain look Javier Bardem throws to the camera. Chin lowered towards his chest and a slight shadow of a crease across his brow, it draws his mouth into a taut, unforgiving line and drives his eyes low into their lids. It tends to emerge after a long sigh, or several threatening tuts delivered in teeth-sucking staccato. It’s seriously sinister stuff.
You’ve seen it a few times. It’s there in No Country for Old Men, in the role for which Bardem won his first Oscar, in 2008. It’s there in Skyfall, in which Bardem’s blond-coiffed bad guy gave us perhaps the best Bond villain of the past 50 years. It’s even there in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, the recent Netflix series in which Bardem plays slain patriarch José Menendez – a man accused of assaulting his two sons – in harrowing flashback.
It’s also here on my laptop screen. The Spanish actor is Zooming in from his home and it’s unnerving, to put it mildly, to get a flash of The Bardem™ firsthand. Not least because those piercing eyes and pursed lips had spent the prior few days (and all nine twisty episodes of Monsters) seared across this very same laptop.
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Gladly, the actor isn’t in a menacing or monstrous mood. Rather, his expression is a reaction to a question, or several questions, of morality and responsibility. Bardem is thinking back on the inner torment he felt accepting the role of Menendez, and the ethical complexities of playing such a person. For, after José Menendez and his wife, Kitty, were shotgunned to death by their young adult sons in 1989, the ensuing murder trial – which is depicted unflinchingly and at length in the Netflix series – saw the boys claim that their father had been physically, psychologically and sexually abusive towards them ever since they were children.
“If you ask me,” says Bardem, brow softening, “I have my own opinion of what did and didn’t happen. That’s based on my research. But it’s my opinion and, as an actor, that’s the only thing I can add for the audience – for the people who are interested in watching what I do. I can help them feel and experience who this person was, so we have a better idea that, beyond the horrible actions, there is a human being with whom we share tons of things. And that could be us – unless we put our attention into what we need to put our attention to.”
Monsters, the second instalment in an anthology series that kicked off with a study of serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, is not an easy gig. Evan Peters, who played Dahmer, in 2022, won a Golden Globe for his depiction of the murderer, but the series came under significant fire from several parties. Bardem, then, did not accept his role lightly. Instead, he committed to playing Menendez in the grey, portraying the character as a dubious but ambiguous vessel through which he could address and discuss the devastating effects of trauma.
“In this case, horrible events in childhood that were never spoken of, or shared with anyone,” says Bardem. “Trauma that was never allowed to be felt. So it’s not a way to justify or excuse anybody’s actions. Instead, it’s a way for us to try to understand a little better why and where they’re coming from. I reckon that’s the only tool any artist has, which is to bring the experience, not the ideas, or the reasoning, or the theories. But the experience of being someone to the audience, to make them feel – just for a second – like that person, so that their judgement opens up.”
“I’m less shy when working in English than in Spanish. Because, in your own language, words have so much weight”
Monsters marks Bardem’s first recurring television role in 38 years, and his first in the English language. Like the rest of us, you were probably first exposed to the actor as Anton Chigurh, the relentless assassin in the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. This performance, which was singled out by the Journal of Forensic Sciences in 2014 as the most realistic depiction of a psychopath in film, was Bardem’s first major Hollywood project. His Spanish film career started years earlier, with diverse turns in Días Contados, Boca a Boca, and Éxtasis – a film that shares its themes of parental dysfunction and revenge with the Menendez story. Bardem also appeared on the soundtrack of Éxtasis, playing the drums. The actor has always held music – particularly heavy metal – close to his heart, and has long credited learning AC/DC lyrics to helping him develop his English. But grasping a new language took time and patience. Occasionally during his early English-speaking career, including on Skyfall, Bardem even commissioned translations of whole scripts into Spanish.
“I had to put a lot of effort into doing a kind of surgery with the words,” the actor explains, pinching his hands into precise shapes and patterns. “I needed to be able to connect the emotions and the organicity with pronunciations, so that people would really understand what I was saying. Today, I speak better English. It’s not great, but it’s better than 25 years ago. Still, there’s a gap that, when it starts to flow and the emotions start to take place, I have to kind of jump off a little cliff – a little bit of an abyss – into the nothing. Because I have to jump to where the words are. In Spanish, it’s just one straight road, and the words accompany you.
“Although, funnily enough,” he shrugs, “I’m less shy when working in English than in Spanish because, in your own language, words have so much weight. The memories and experiences you have with those words, and the images that they take you to. And, since I have lived my life in English for way less time than I have lived it in Spanish, I don’t have so many of these. That means I can make certain heavy words, or heavy thoughts, or profound reflections more easily in English than I can in Spanish.”
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It’s a stroke of professional good fortune Bardem shares with his wife, fellow Spanish actor (and Oscar winner) Penélope Cruz, whom he has starred alongside in more than half a dozen films. For this Gentleman’s Journal cover, Cruz photographed Bardem in their Madrid home, capturing the same creative chemistry they first fired up together in 1992 tragicomedy Jamón Jamón.
“She was 17, and I was 22,” recalls Bardem. “It was her first movie; one of my first movies. A big movie. We met on the wardrobe test, where we looked at each other, and I guess something happened. Something that doesn’t have any explanation and goes beyond logic and reasoning. But, back in the day, we had different lives, different objectives, aims and goals. Yet, something was there – an energy, a chemistry, a way to rely on each other as human beings. And that stayed for so long, even though we didn’t see each other or speak to each other for many years.”
“I have tons of flaws, and things that need to be fixed in terms of me as a human being”
By the time the pair reunited, both actors had moved beyond Spain’s cinematic borders and become global stars. And, in 2007, on the set of Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the two finally reconnected romantically.
“We realised that the feeling was still alive. Very alive,” Bardem laughs. “To our surprise! But it happened that we were both single at that moment, so naturally what had to happen happened – two people reconnected because they shared tons of things, way more than they expected. But we also shared that we met each other and knew each other before all of the noise, before success and before anybody saw us with different eyes because of who we now were, what we had become. And that’s an important base, to rely on someone because you know them for real, and they know you for real. You see me, I see you. That’s important.”
Bardem’s every observation, every musing, is laced with gravitas. It’s not difficult when he comes out with wisdoms like this, of course, but even his more fleeting remarks and throwaway anecdotes sound weightier than they should. It’s probably that unique voice of his, gilding every word with poise and power. The accent helps, sure, but there’s something singular in its rich tone and timbre – each cadence aches and breaks like the felling of a great tree. It is the resounding foundation of his performer’s toolkit, and the gift that makes him so perfect for bringing compelling villains to life.
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The hair, too, is another hallmark of a Bardem bad guy. The unmistakable pageboy cut in No Country for Old Men was styled using Bardem’s own hair, as were the hedgehog spikes of his drug dealer in Ridley Scott’s ever-misunderstood The Counselor. In the fifth Pirates of the Caribbean film, however, his cursed, pirate-hunting antagonist had CG tresses and, elsewhere in the ocean, his overbearing King Triton in last year’s The Little Mermaid remake wore a wig. Skyfall was a wig, too. And, in Monsters, a wig even plays a key role in the story, with an early episode showing Bardem’s José Menendez strong-arming his balding son, Lyle, into wearing a toupee. This is perhaps the only sliver of Menendez that Bardem could accept without question. “I love hairpieces!” the actor laughs. “Hair, I think, is always such an important part of the masquerade.”
But Bardem’s most notable Hollywood turn of recent years, that of tribal leader Stilgar in Dune and Dune: Part Two, keeps his hair largely shielded from the sun under a tightly tied desert headscarf. Cast in the films by director Denis Villeneuve – who Bardem describes as “adorable” and “Lovely! Caring! Super generous! And funny as hell!” – the actor only had limited scenes in the first instalment of the series. And, when he returned to film the sequel in 2022, it marked the first time in his career that he had revisited a role.
“It was a very strange experience,” he nods, “but also a very rewarding one. As, in the first film, I only had two weeks of work – a couple of scenes. So it was kind of an appetiser, but I felt the power and the joy and the greatness of being on set with Denis. At the same time, I didn’t really have the chance to taste it. So, when they confirmed that there was a second part, I took that as much as my very first Dune movie.”
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Bardem is prepared to return for the third film in the science-fiction franchise, although he is “afraid that I know exactly the same as you know about it”. Before then, however, he will return to the big screen in next summer’s Brad Pitt racing vehicle, F1, helmed by Top Gun: Maverick director Joseph Kosinski. Like Monsters, which has one foot in make-believe and the other in truth, the sports drama will straddle fiction and reality. Bardem plays the owner of a struggling Formula 1 team who is forced to call on Pitt’s ex-driver for help, and he filmed several scenes during genuine 2023 World Championship races.
“We also shared that we met each other and knew each other before all of the noise”
“We were going to real places, to real races with real drivers,” says the actor. “All of them were very supportive, because Lewis Hamilton is a producer, and he worked on the script. So the project is very welcome in the F1 world, and that showed when we got to Silverstone, for example, and were shooting for five days straight in the pits, or on the track. Before the race started, Brad had a chance to get on the track and drive his car while thousands of fans were screaming out, going crazy. Because it was Brad!”
Bardem’s F1 team owner, Ruben, may be based on a handful of real-life executives, but he isn’t a direct portrayal of an actual person – unlike several of the actor’s previous roles. In the past, Bardem has played Pablo Escobar (another role alongside Penélope Cruz), Cuban-American showman Desi Arnaz (another Oscar nomination) and Spanish seaman Ramón Sampedro (another excellent wig).
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The role he’s perhaps most proud of is one we’ll likely never see. For 11 years, Bardem worked with Steven Spielberg to bring the story of 16th-century Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés to the screen. The project, which was to be a four-episode mini-series for Amazon (in both Spanish and the historic Náhuatl Aztec languages), filmed for just two weeks in early 2020. Then, the pandemic struck and, after several months of uncertainty, it was cancelled.
“I was so devastated,” says Bardem. “All of this work, of so many years and so much quality, so much meaning… all gone. I heard there might be a possibility of getting it back and rescuing the project, but I said to Steven: ‘We’d better hurry up, otherwise I’ll be doing it as the grandfather of Cortés!’”
Bardem is 55 – not quite grandfather territory just yet, but he and Cruz have two children, Leo and Luna. The actor reveals that he’s currently reading Dr Shefali Tsabary’s bestselling guide, The Parenting Map, in a bid to become the best parent possible. “And this closes the circle of what we started speaking about,” says the actor. “That’s how important childhood is. We all know it, but we must nurture and be really sensitive to our little ones in order for them to grow up in a healthy way. It’s an investment to society. Every child is an investment to society.”
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Bardem calls his family his “tribe”, but, unlike the patriarchal Stilgar of the Dune films, or the iron-fisted King Triton from The Little Mermaid, the actor is less sure of what sort of father he is. “I know more what kind of father that I don’t want to be,” he says, “and that’s one that stays all over his children, telling them what to do, how to do it and putting pressure that they don’t need on them. I don’t want to have expectations of who I want them to become just for my own good, or my own reward.”
Another dose of decency and wisdom – and another reason it’s surprising that Bardem can so effectively play the villain. Because, from alleged abusers to fictional hitmen to the vengeful undead, he’s somehow plumbed the depths of human depravity and emerged a better man. But there’s still work to be done, says the actor – especially when it comes to fatherhood.
“I’m flawed,” he explains. “I have tons of flaws, and things that need to be fixed in terms of me as a human being. But to be able to educate anybody is the most important responsibility that you’re ever going to have. You’re helping to guide, to shape someone, and how can you do that if you don’t educate yourself? If you don’t really evaluate who you are as a human being?
“Who are you? And what have you achieved?” continues Bardem, shades of that ever-recognisable, ill-omened expression creeping back across his face. “What are our flaws? What are our virtues? Because we must all work on our virtues, give attention to our virtues. But we must really give attention to our flaws.”
Thanks to:
Photo assistant: Lorenzo Profilio
Groomer: Pablo Iglesias
This feature was taken from our Autumn 2024 issue. Read more about it here.
Want more cover stories? We pay a visit to Charles Leclerc…
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