The one performance Javier Bardem wants every actor to see: “It’s a museum piece”
Has there ever been a creepier, more menacing performance than the one Javier Bardem gave in 2007’s No Country for Old Men? Tough to say.
Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter probably runs it close. Jack Nicholson in The Shining is pretty disturbing. But for sheer, run of the mill, casual as you like terror, there aren’t really any to match Bardem’s hit man Anton Chigurh.
It’s hard to put your finger on exactly why he’s so scary – it could be the weird hair, the height, the smile, the way he goes about killing in the kind of matter of fact way most people would just collect their post in the morning. But from the opening scene of the film, when Bardem’s character is put in the back of a State Trooper’s police car, followed by an oxygen tank, you know full well he is very bad news indeed.
Spanish-born Bardem deservedly won an Oscar for his performance in the film, but he had in fact been nominated for Academy Awards three times before the breakout role in No Country… during a career in Spanish cinema that stretched back as far as 1992’s Jamon Jamon.
His work over the following decade was so good that he was approached by the likes of John Malkovich to work in Hollywood, however at that point, he still only spoke Spanish. He was, however, left an answer machine message full of praise by none other than Al Pacino a few years later, after his first English-speaking role in 2000’s Before Night Falls, for which he got the first of his Oscar nominations.
After a small role in the 2004 Tom Cruise crime thriller Collateral, Bardem starred opposite Natalie Portman in a biographical film about a Spanish painter named Goya’s Ghosts before he was cast in the Coen Brothers masterpiece that changed his life.
So taken was Hollywood by Bardem’s performance in No Country that he began to be spoken of in the same breath as some of the acting greats. Francis Ford Coppola, for one, thought he was a natural heir to the likes of Robert De Niro and Pacino. Bardem himself is certainly a fan of the great talents of cinema, and one actor in particular, as he revealed to Backstage.
When asked to pick a performance that every actor should see, Bardem said: “Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire because of what he represents and what he really meant for acting. After that moment, he changed the whole way of performing for the rest of history.”
Brando was 27 when he appeared in the adaptation of Tennessee Williams’s play opposite Vivien Leigh in 1951, and it earned him the first of a staggering four consecutive Best Actor nominations at the Academy Awards. Set in the deep South of America, the film is a melodrama depicting an evicted teacher who moves in with her sister in law and her violent husband in New Orleans. It has since gone down as one of the finest films of the era.
It had a convincing effect on a young Bardem, who was especially taken with Brando’s brutish performance, saying: “When Marlon Brando did the (Streetcar director) Elia Kazan movie, being that young and being that present, so focused in every second of every frame of the movie, where you absolutely don’t know what he’s going to do next – even today, after seeing the movie a hundred times, it elevates in you that feeling of insecurity, watching that performance. It’s a museum piece. It’s part of history.”
Bardem turned his worldwide recognition for his performance in No Country into a series of acclaimed roles over the next fifteen years, including a memorable Bond villain in Skyfall and as Stilgar in the big-budget Denis Villeneuve franchise Dune. Most recently, he’s been seen opposite Brad Pitt in the racing movie F1.
