Biutiful man

INTERVIEW:On screen and off, Javier Bardem oozes masculinity, charisma and seriousness of purpose – qualities essential to his role in a searing new drama about a desperate father nearing the end of the line. The Oscar-winning actor talks stardom, paparazzi and seeing dead people with TARA BRADY

LATELY ARRIVED IN rainy London from an acrid shoot in Oklahoma, Javier Bardem is looking a little bit the worse for wear. Between teas and ill-advised cigarettes, he apologies profusely as he calls home to ascertain what exactly he takes when he’s under the weather. There’s something that always works for him, “but I can’t remember the title”.

Lemon and honey are duly ordered. “I’m dying,” he sniffs, confirming the worst: Iberian heart-throb Javier Bardem has man-flu.

Bardem, a powerfully built former rugby player, appears to be about nine feet tall once he’s vertical. It’s a little discombobulating to think that he might be susceptible to the same boring ailments as the rest of us.

It is even odder to encounter him contending with the sniffles having just watched Biutiful, a heartbreaking new film in which the 41-year-old Spaniard plays a man dying from prostate cancer. “It was not a movie where you get to turn up and say the lines and just try to believe in the words you say,” suggests the star.

That's something of an understatement in the circumstances. Biutiful, the latest critical sensation from 21 Gramsdirector Alejandro González Iñárritu, casts Bardem as Uxbal, an ailing Mexican ghost whisperer. Desperate to leave his young children with means, Uxbal puts together an unethical get-rich-quick scheme around a group of illegal Chinese immigrants in the hope of dodging and diving his way to a lump-sum legacy. Sadly, this flirtation with low-rent capitalism is not without terrible, unintended consequences.

“What Iñárritu proposed to me when we first talked about the script was a life experience,” says Bardem. “It was like climbing a mountain.The view is great. It’s an adventure. Let’s do it. But I don’t know what’s going to happen on the journey.”

It doesn’t stop at the mountain. Throughout his various trials and tribulations the beleaguered Uxbal can see dead people, always knowing he’ll soon join their number. For Bardem, a lapsed Catholic and atheist, inhabiting such otherworldly material was a tough station.

“It’s a very Mexican part of the movie. I’m not from Mexico. I’ve been there. I have some friends there. But I don’t know anything about Mexico; it’s not for me to talk about the culture in depth. If you ask my opinion, it is a very magic realist place. The way they talk about the afterlife is very vivid. That said, I’ve had the chance to meet three people that have that gift in Spain.”

They really talk to dead people?

“Oh yes,” he says. “It was very amazing to see. The real ones with real talent don’t pretend and don’t put on shows. They have that gift. If you want to look and listen, they are there. It was useful for me to watch how natural it is for them.

“These people will sit with you as you and I are sitting now, and you’ll notice that they’re staring over your shoulder or addressing someone beside you that you can’t see. It’s not magic. They will tell you what the dead person beside you is saying and you will freak out.”

Biutifulis an audacious film that touches on capitalism, mortality and most everything in between. It's also very typical of Bardem. As a younger man, the actor became a household name for taking his shirt off in such racy Latin comedies as The Ages of Lulu, High Heelsand Jamón, jamón. But his films of the past decade have seldom been frivolous. In Before Night Fallshe played the persecuted Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas; in The Dancer Upstairshe tracked a fictionalised version of the Shining Path; in The Sea Insidehe was Ramón Sampedro, the late quadriplegic campaigner for assisted suicide.

"There are certain parts," he says, "like The Sea Insideand Before Night Fallsand Biutiful. . . you just have to do them. You don't go looking; they find you. I read the scripts and I think, I have to do that. I don't know if I will be able to convey it or achieve it, but I have to try.

“Like any actor, I want to be honest and truthful onscreen. Sometimes you might feel what you are doing and other times you do not. As long as the audience feel its real. That’s the important thing.”

Does he find the earnest approach and all that weighty material exhausting?

"Yes, absolutely yes," says Bardem. "It's not easy. You are dealing with such strong material. And I like to prepare. I prepared for three months before Biutifulwith my acting teacher. I go to the same school and teacher for every role for the last 20 years. So at the end of the process it is eight months of doing the same thing everyday.

“You shoot 10 or 11 hours, you go home and you start preparing for the next day. You go through the scenes again. Weekends come, you want to rest but you always know what is coming next week. That kind of work doesn’t allow you to let yourself go.”

For a committed performer, Bardem is strangely ambivalent about his job. Born into a family of film-makers, noted Communists and actors (his mother is the award-winning screen star Pilar Bardem), the young Javier was actually determined to avoid a life in the business. Tellingly, he invariably talks about his career in terms of “working”, never “acting”.

“I wanted to be a painter, but I guess it was in my blood,” he says. “I was raised in theatres with my mother and I know how hard it is. I didn’t want to go in that direction. I didn’t want to do that with my life. The job found me. There was no way I couldn’t do it. Once I knew that, I took it seriously. I decided that if I was going to do this I have to do it well. Let’s focus. But in the end, I’m just a very, very lucky man. Most of the people who do this are out of work.”

These are hectic times for the Spanish star. As Oscar season closes in he has already scooped the award for Best Actor for Biutifulat the Cannes Film Festival and earned rave notices from the most unlikely sources (Sean Penn called Bardem's performance the "best since Brando in Last Tango in Paris"). The attention is, Bardem hopes, good for the movie. It is perhaps not so good for him.

A fiercely private individual, his comings and goings have been of some interest to the press ever since the Coen brothers introduced him to the wider Anglophone world with an Oscar-winning turn in No Country for Old Men. It was not the quietest moment for the actor to get involved with Penélope Cruz.

Spain's most famous couple have been cavorting together on-screen since Jamón, jamónsome 19 years ago. They met as old friends on the set of Woody Allen's Vicki Christina Barcelonain 2007 and were married last year. Paparazzi are currently camped outside their Hollywood home awaiting the birth of their first child, due any day now.

“This is a job,” Bardem sighs. “Promotion is part of that job. We’re both working here and that’s great. But that does not mean that the world owns me. I don’t pay attention to any of that stuff. I try not to. It is one of the things I have learned from my family. It’s not worth worrying about what other people think. Just keep on doing your thing. Draw the line.”

“I think it’s crazy,” he continues. “We are all just people sharing the same needs. It doesn’t matter where you’re coming from. It’s about surviving and helping your family to survive. What else is there? It is absurd that people want to look at me when there are so many other things in the world.”

Has the posse of embedded tabloid reporters outside changed the way he goes about his business? “No. Not in any real, dense way. Change can only come from yourself. It’s not about other people or how you deal with the press. They can’t touch you.”

Bardem smiles wryly. “As long as you learn to detach yourself from your soul a little bit.”