The role Javier Bardem was “reluctantly” talked into playing: “You’ll never get him”
We all have to do things we don’t want to do now and then. Taking the bins out is a pain in the arse, nobody enjoys the dentist, and everyone has to get passport photos taken occasionally. You have to just sigh, suck it up and crack on with it. And that is probably how the Oscar-winning Spanish actor Javier Bardem ended up in Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile.
Let’s not forget, we are talking about the man who played possibly the most menacing movie villain in all of cinema history, not just terrifying for that strange bowl haircut in No Country For Old Men, but also due to the fact that he would happily kill you with a compressed air cattle gun simply for guessing incorrectly in a game of heads or tails.
We are also talking about the man who, in 2012’s Skyfall, took on not just James Bond but all of MI6, dispatching poor old Judi Dench without so much as a glimmer of sadness, and the man who is about to absolutely terrorise a family as a tattooed psychopath in the joint Scorsese-Spielberg produced reboot of Cape Fear. This is a scary guy we’re talking about. So how did he end up jumping about in a top hat in a film about a singing CGI crocodile?
Well, according to the director of the 2022 musical for kids, Will Speck, they didn’t really expect him to, even though they thought it would be a great idea. And they were really quite shocked when the Spaniard replied ‘yes’ to becoming Mr Hector P Valentini in the movie, the flamboyant owner of said singing crocodilian.
Speck told Collider, “We said ‘Javier’, and the studio said ‘well, you’ll never get him, but good luck’. And then six Zooms later, he finally, reluctantly said yes. I think he was nervous about jumping into something that he perceived to be very comedic in his mind.”
To be fair to Bardem, given the synopsis of the movie – “A family move to New York where their son befriends a giant walking crocodile who can only communicate through song” – it’s probably not surprising he had second thoughts, no matter how big the paycheck was.
But Speck and the producers were undeterred, adding, “We talked to him about the integrity of the character and finding the dramatic roots to the character ultimately so that it wasn’t just played for jokes, but that we wanted to play this as a fully dimensional, real character, and that’s why we wanted him.”
Which is an incredibly flowery way of saying, “Do you reckon Javier Bardem would do this if we paid him enough cash?”. After all, it’s an all-singing, all-dancing CGI kids film about an anthropomorphic alligator. It’s not The Godfather.
Perhaps it paid off in the end, because the film did pretty well on its release, doubling its budget of $50million at the box office and receiving some fairly generous reviews from critics who quite predictably said that Bardem was by far the best thing in it.
Aside from Cape Fear, Bardem will have a massive Christmas movie to promote this December as he prepares to get all sandy again in Dune: Part Three, which will go head-to-head with the Russo Brothers’ Avengers: Doomsday in the festive battle for festive bums on seats.
