“It took me a little while to say yes”: The one thing Javier Bardem hates doing on-screen
The ability to learn some lines and regurgitate them on camera doesn’t mean that your thoughts and opinions are more important than the average person’s, but nevertheless, movie stars have what’s called a platform, and for decades, they have used it to make political statements, just like Javier Bardem at this year’s Oscars.
Bardem, who said simply “No to war and Free Palestine” to rapturous applause from the ceremony attendees, many of whom would have voted for Donald Trump in the last US election, is not someone who simply spied an opportunity, however.
He has long been a political activist, using his fame and money to back causes he believes in, including Palestine, campaigning against the Iraq war as far back as 2003 and staging a protest at the Russian embassy in Madrid against the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, so he is not someone who would simply use an Oscars ceremony to back a campaign and then never mention it again, far from it.
What he is is an actor who does menacing characters better than many have done over the last couple of decades; iconic for the Coen brothers’ No Country For Old Men, and for his James Bond villain Raoul Silva in Daniel Craig’s Sceptre in 2012. The former, without question, is one of the most terrifying bad guys in movie history, and it’s probably that which earns Bardem the reputation as a movie antagonist to be reckoned with.
In his defence, though, he doesn’t believe it to be the case, pointing out that he has a long career behind him in which he has played roles of almost every type in almost every genre you can think of. He told Parade back in 2007, five years before his Bond baddie role, “I’ve done only two movies, where I hold a gun. Once I did it in ’96. It was an experience,” he began.
Adding, “I hate it. It’s not that I hate the movie. I think the movie is fun. It was called Perdita Durango. Here it was translated as Dance With the Devil. It was very violent. I had good fun with the director, but I hate the experience of killing people. 11 years after I did a movie with the Coens (No Country), where I am a killer. It took me a little while to say yes to this, even though the Coens are my favourite directors.”
That’s the problem at hand, Bardem is evidently a pacifist, and that doesn’t really chime with being someone as legitimately trouser-wettingly frightening as the oxygen canister dragging Anton Chigurh in the Coens classic, but were the signs already there in Dance With The Devil?
You could probably say so, although Bardem’s character in that movie, while physically imposing, is rendered much less scary by a haircut that, somehow, is even worse than the bowl cut the Coens saddled him with. The movie itself is an action horror co-starring White Men Can’t Jump’s Rosie Perez and featuring Bardem’s drug-dealing bank robber doing lots of cocaine, pretending to be a priest and then eventually resorting to cannibalism for some unknown reason.
It didn’t pull up any trees at the box office, and reviews were decidedly mixed, but it was enough to earn some attention in Hollywood, and he was approached by established stars like John Malkovich for roles which he initially turned down due to feeling his English wasn’t yet good enough.
After having a massive hit last year with the Brad Pitt motor racing monster F1, he is now going to be seen later this year in Apple TV’s remake of Cape Fear, which will be a series rather than a movie, and December’s blockbuster sci-fi Dune Part 3.
