The movie that convinced Javier Bardem to become an actor: “That made it click for me”
Every film fan remembers where they were when they first saw Javier Bardem as Anton Chigurh, the cold-eyed, dogged antagonist of the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men. Chigurh ruthlessly pursues Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) across the Texas wasteland in an attempt to retrieve the money that fell into his possession. He regularly appears in lists of the greatest movie villains or psychopaths of all time, with Bardem’s performance receiving near-universal praise from critics of all natures.
Before he became the first Spaniard to win an Oscar, Bardem was appearing in movies and TV shows in his native land. His mother, Pilar, won a Goya Award (the Spanish equivalent of an Oscar) for her performance in the 1995 noir flick Nadie hablará de nosotras cuando hayamos muerto, alternatively known as Nobody Will Speak of Us When We’re Dead. Her son followed in her footsteps, before landing his major international break in Julian Schnabel’s Before Night Falls.
The star’s upbringing clearly played a major part in his decision to become an actor. Two of his siblings, Carlos and Mónica, also became performers, so acting definitely runs in his blood. Javier and Carlos even appeared together in the 1997 film Perdita Durango, which was released in the United States as Dance with the Devil. However, it wasn’t just his home life that led Bardem to fame and fortune; outside factors also had a say in the matter.
Speaking to The Academy, Mr Penélope Cruz was asked to name his five favourite films of all time. After providing a list that included The Godfather, All That Jazz, ET the Extra-Terrestrial, and the Spanish anti-Franco movie ¡Bienvenido, Mister Marshall!, Bardem revealed his fifth and final pick as Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro’s definitive boxing masterpiece, Raging Bull.
In his own words, this was the film that set him on his way to also joining the ranks of Hollywood. “I saw that [Raging Bull] with my father,” he revealed, “I asked him when the movie finished, ‘Who was that boxer?’ He told me, ‘No, he’s an actor’. I said, ‘No, that cannot be true. He’s a boxer. He boxes. He’s a boxer’. ‘No, he’s an actor who prepared himself’. I guess that made it click for me, like, ‘OK, I want to do that’.”
The process De Niro undertook to star in Raging Bull is nothing short of legendary. In order to play Jake LaMotta, the real-life boxer whose story inspired the film, the actor sparred with the man himself to get a feel for what he was like in the ring. Some accounts even mention that he actually got into the ring for several proper boxing matches, winning two out of three amateur fights he had in his native New York. For the scenes following LaMotta’s retirement, De Niro embarked on a journey to gain 60lbs of weight, which involved moving to Paris and eating in restaurants every day until he was in the right shape.
For his efforts, De Niro was not only rewarded with an Oscar for ‘Best Actor’ but also the label of one of the greatest performers of his generation. It was this role that inspired countless audience members, Bardem included, to get out of their seats and see if they could pull off this whole ‘acting’ malarkey for themselves.
