Javier Bardem

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Early life

Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem was born on 1 March 1969 in Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, Spain. His mother, Pilar Bardem (1939–2021), was an actress, and his father, José Carlos Encinas Doussinague (1931–1995), was the son of a cattle rancher from the province of Salamanca. According to Pilar's memoirs, José had a "capricious and violent will," and shot up the front door. He changed jobs more than 10 times, leading to evictions and the children going hungry. The two separated shortly after Javier's birth. His mother raised him and his elder siblings, Carlos and Mónica, alone (another sibling died shortly after birth), both of whom have also pursued an acting career. His father died of leukemia in 1995.

On his mother’s side, Bardem comes from a long line of filmmakers and actors dating back to the earliest days of Spanish cinema. He is a grandson of actors Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro (sister of actresses Mercedes and Guadalupe), and a nephew of screenwriter and director Juan Antonio Bardem. On the latter's side, he is a cousin of filmmaker Miguel Bardem. His uncle Juan Antonio was imprisoned by the Franco regime for his anti-fascist films. Bardem was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith by his grandmother.

As a child, he spent time at theatres and on film sets. In 1974, he made his first television appearance, in Fernando Fernán Gómez's television series El pícaro (The Scoundrel). He also played rugby for the junior Spanish National Team. Though he grew up in a family full of actors, Bardem did not see himself going into the family business, and painting was his preferred medium. He went on to study painting for four years at Madrid's Escuela de Artes y oficios. In need of money, he took acting jobs to support his painting but felt he was a bad painter and eventually abandoned it as a career.

In 1989, for the Spanish comedy show El Día Por Delante (The Day Ahead), he had to wear a Superman costume for a comedic sketch, a job that made him question whether he wanted to be an actor at all. Bardem also worked as a stripper (for one day) during his struggling acting career.

2000–2011: Breakthrough and acclaim

After starring in about two dozen films in his native country, he gained international recognition in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls in 2000, portraying Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. He received praise from his idol Al Pacino; the message Pacino left on Bardem's answering machine was something he considers one of the most beautiful gifts he has ever received. For that role, he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Spaniard to do so. Immediately after, he turned down the role of Danny Witwer in Minority Report which eventually went to Colin Farrell. Instead, in 2002, Bardem starred in Malkovich's directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs. Malkovich originally had Bardem in mind for the role of the detective's assistant, but the movie's time trying to find financing gave Bardem time to learn English and take on the lead role of the detective. "I will always be grateful to him because he really gave me my very first chance to work in English", Bardem has said of Malkovich.

Bardem won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in Mar adentro, released in the United States as The Sea Inside (2004), in which he portrayed the quadriplegic turned assisted suicide activist Ramón Sampedro. He made his Hollywood major studio debut in a brief appearance as a crime lord who summons Tom Cruise's hitman to do the dirty work of dispatching witnesses in the crime action film Collateral. He starred in Miloš Forman's 2006 film Goya's Ghosts opposite Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgard, where he plays a twisted monk during the Spanish Inquisition.

In 2007, Bardem acted in two film adaptations: the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men with Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin by Cormac McCarthy, and Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera with Giovanna Mezzogiorno by Gabriel García Márquez. In No Country for Old Men, he played a psychopathic assassin, Anton Chigurh. For that role, he became the first Spaniard to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also won Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, Critics' Choice Award, and BAFTA Award in the same category.

Bardem's rendition of Chigurh's trademark quote, "What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo?" (in response to the convenience store owner's query, "Y'all gettin' any rain up your way?"), was named Top HollyWORDIE of 2007 in the annual survey by the Global Language Monitor. Chigurh was named No. 26 in Entertainment Weekly magazine's 2008 "50 Most Vile Villains in Movie History" list. Bardem's life's work was honored at the 2007 Gotham Awards, produced by The Gotham Film & Media Institute. In 2014, Belgian psychiatry professor Samuel Leistedt and 10 associates watched 400 movies over the course of three years and identified 126 psychopathic characters: Bardem's rendition of Chigurh was voted the most realistic psychopath.

Francis Ford Coppola singled out Bardem as an heir to, and even improvement on, Pacino, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro, referring to Bardem as ambitious, hungry, unwilling to rest on his laurels and always "excited to do something good." Bardem was attached to play the role of Tetro's mentor in Coppola's film Tetro, but the director felt the character should be female, so he was replaced by fellow Spaniard Carmen Maura. Bardem was originally cast to play fictional filmmaker Guido Contini in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Nine but dropped out due to exhaustion. The part eventually went to Daniel Day-Lewis. He went on to star alongside Cruz and Scarlett Johansson in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), where he earned his fourth Golden Globe nomination.

2012–present: Established career

In 2010, Bardem was awarded Best Actor at the Cannes Film Festival for his performance in Biutiful directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, who specifically wrote the film with Bardem in mind. After being overlooked by the Globes and SAG, Bardem was the unexpected Oscar nominee on 25 January 2011, becoming the first all Spanish-language Best Actor nominee ever. He won his fifth Goya Award, this time for Best Actor in Biutiful, dedicating the win to his wife, Cruz, and their newborn son. Around this same time, he was offered the lead role of "Gunslinger" Roland Deschain in Ron Howard's film adaptation of Stephen King's Dark Tower novels. If he had signed on, he would have starred in the TV series as well. Then Eon Productions offered him a role as villain Raoul Silva in the James Bond film Skyfall. With Universal Pictures deciding not to go forward with the ultra-ambitious adaptation of the eight-novel King series, and to end months of speculation, Bardem officially confirmed his role in Skyfall during an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC's Nightline.

Bardem received the 2,484th star of the Hollywood Walk of Fame on 8 November 2012. The star is located outside the El Capitan Theatre. With his movie Sons of the Clouds (2012), he demonstrated the suffering of the Sahrawi people in refugee camps. He publicly denounced the UN as unwilling to definitively resolve the human crisis there.

Bardem portrayed the main antagonist, Armando Salazar, in 2017's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the fifth film in the series. In the same year, he starred with Jennifer Lawrence, Michelle Pfeiffer, and Ed Harris in the horror film Mother! by director Darren Aronofsky, which focuses on a couple whose lives are disrupted by the arrival of unexpected guests. In 2018, Bardem once again appeared on screen alongside his spouse Cruz in Asghar Farhadi's feature film Everybody Knows.

In 2021, Bardem portrayed Stilgar in Denis Villeneuve's science fiction film Dune. That same year, he starred as Julio Blanco in Fernando León de Aranoa's workplace satire The Good Boss. His leading performance portraying a manipulative factory boss was considered among the finest of his career by critics, and clinched him another Goya Award. Also in 2021, he starred as Desi Arnaz, alongside Nicole Kidman as his on-screen wife Lucille Ball, in Amazon MGM Studios' and Aaron Sorkin's Being the Ricardos. Despite unfavorable reactions in response to his casting as Arnaz, Bardem's portrayal received praise. For his performance, he received nominations for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Drama and the Actor Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Leading Role, as well as his third Academy Award nomination for Best Actor, his fourth nomination overall.

Bardem was initially set to play Frankenstein's monster in the upcoming remake of the Bride of Frankenstein directed by Bill Condon, but the project was eventually cancelled. He appeared in the 2022 film Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile and played King Triton in Disney's 2023 live-action/CGI movie, The Little Mermaid, directed by Rob Marshall. In 2024, Bardem reprised the role of Stilgar in Dune: Part Two and worked once again with Kidman in the Netflix and Skydance Animation film, Spellbound. On 10 July 2023, Deadline announced that Bardem would star with Brad Pitt in F1 for Apple TV, with Warner Bros. Pictures handling theatrical distribution. The film was released in 2025.

In September 2024, during the reception of his 2023 Donostia Award for career achievement at the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival, answering a question about his availability to Spanish filmmakers other than his friend de Aranoa, Bardem announced that he had been cast to star alongside Victoria Luengo in Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beloved, due to begin filming in January 2025 in Fuerteventura. The film premiered at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival. Peter Bradshaw from The Guardian assessed that, in The Beloved, Bardem gives "his scariest performance since No Country for Old Men", as a "coercive and controlling" movie director. In 2024, he starred as José Menendez, the father of Lyle and Erik Menendez, in Netflix's Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, which earned him nominations for Primetime Emmy Award, Golden Globe Award, and Screen Actors Guild Award in the Best Supporting Actor category. In advance of the 2025 Cannes Film Market, Bardem was reported to have been cast in Florian Zeller's psychological thriller Bunker alongside his wife Cruz. Bardem portrayed Max Cady in the Apple TV series Cape Fear, opposite Amy Adams and Patrick Wilson.

Bardem will make his stage debut on 5 November 2026 at Espacio Zafra Teatro in the play Chéjov, Chéjov, directed and adapted by Bardem's acting coach Juan Carlos Corazza from short stories by Anton Chekhov.

In 2026, Bardem joined the voice cast of the upcoming animated film The Turning Door.

Javier Bardem

Javier Bardem

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Early life

Career

1990–1999: Early roles

2000–2011: Breakthrough and acclaim

2012–present: Established career

Activism and political stances

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