The actor who almost replaced Javier Bardem in ‘No Country for Old Men’: “I got a call”
There are certain characters it’s impossible to imagine being played by anyone else, and No Country for Old Men‘s menacing, haunting, and altogether terrifying antagonist, Anton Chigurh, is definitely one of them. And yet, Javier Bardem was almost replaced at the last second by somebody else.
It would be an understatement to say the Coen brothers have always had a keen eye for casting, and tasking Bardem to bring the emotionless, sociopathic, floppy-haired Terminator to life is right up there with their best. He deservedly won the Academy Award for ‘Best Supporting Actor’, and it’s arguably the definitive performance of his entire career.
Trying to envision an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel without Bardem’s spine-chilling presence doesn’t even bear thinking about, but it almost happened. You could replace almost all of the story’s main players with another performer, and the film wouldn’t lose too much of its potency, but swapping out the star who struck fear into the hearts of everyone he encountered is unthinkable.
Take Josh Brolin, for instance. As great as he was as Llewelyn Moss, he was nowhere near the Coens’ first choice. They’d offered the role to Heath Ledger, but after he’d turned it down and No Country co-star Garrett Dillahunt had unsuccessfully auditioned five times for the part, a helping hand from Quentin Tarantino saw the Goonies alum get the nod.
It wasn’t that Bardem was having second thoughts, but the spectre of scheduling conflicts almost made it an impossibility. Principal photography was scheduled to begin in May 2006, which threatened to overlap with Mike Newell’s Love in the Time of Cholera, with the Spaniard playing the lead role of Florentino Ariza.
As a result, Joel and Ethan were almost forced into a late switcheroo, which would have made them break the emergency glass that was labelled ‘Mark Strong’. “I got down to the last two for that part, would you believe?” he explained, per Digital Spy. “The Coen brothers had seen Syriana and Oliver Twist and decided to meet, because they couldn’t believe it was the same person.”
He met the siblings in New York, performed a scene from the script, “and half an hour later, I was out of the room.” Strong was under the impression that every actor in town was in the running for the part, only to find out that “they’d only seen a handful,” and “it was between me and Javier.”
Shortly before shooting, he revealed that, “I got a call saying Javier’s dates won’t work, and I was expecting to go to New Mexico for five months.” Obviously, he didn’t get the chance to play Chigurh, and the scheduling gods realigned to ensure that No Country for Old Men wrapped by mid-August, weeks before Bardem’s first day on the set of Love in the Time of Cholera.
The hardest thing in trying to picture Strong as Chigurh is how ridiculous he’d look with that hair, which may well have shattered the suspension of disbelief from the second he showed up onscreen. It never came to that, fortunately, even if the second choice who was waiting in the wings would have been left to rue the day he came agonisingly close to playing such an iconic character.
