Javier Bardem says AC/DC helped him to learn English: “All the curses, all the bad words”
Actor Javier Bardem is one of the best-known and best-loved actors of his kind. He’s starred in a number of Spanish-language films throughout his career but has also racked up an impressive amount of English-language performances along the way. In fact, Bardem owes his English language ability to the rock band AC/DC.
Bardem recently appeared on Conan O’Brien’s podcast Conan Needs a Friend, in which he explained how the famous rockers helped him learn a new language. “AC/DC, yeah! All the curses, all the bad words I learned from AC/DC, fuck yeah!” Bardem exclaimed. “And I’m still learning.”
“There’s a song called ‘If You Want Blood’, ‘High Voltage’, ‘Let There Be Rock’,” he continued. “Those were the first songs, and you have to understand that I’m 54, I will have tapes, I will open the tapes, get the lyrics, and the lyrics were in Spanish. I had to translate it.”
Bardem then went on to explain how he would translate AC/DC’s tunes. “But for me, it was like, ‘What are they saying?’ It’s not in Spanish. I was trying to make sense of the word in Spanish and what I was hearing. And then I would look to a dictionary, and then because of that, I would learn the word on top of the word below. So AC/DC helped me learn English because I wanted to learn the lyrics.”
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