Javier Bardem

YOU WILL NEVER SEE THE SAME MAN TWICE: NOT THE STOIC PYSICAL PRESENCE OF HIS EARLY FILMS, THE GREAT GAY-CUBAN WRITER IN BEFORE NIGHT FALLS, OR THE UNEMPLOYED DOCKWORKER LOOKING FOR DIGNITY AND THE FRUSTRATED, DRIFTING POLICEMAN OF HIS TWO FILMS THIS MONTH. MEET THE EVER-EVOLVING JAVIER BARDEM

As the star of some of Spain's most indelible films of the 1990s--including Pedro Almodovar's High Heels (1991) and Live Flesh (1997) and Jose Juan Bigas Luna's Jamon Jamon (1992)--Javier Bardem was already a major presence in his native country when Julian Schnabel's Before Night Fails exploded onto America's screens in 2000. For his performance in that film, Bardem earned a Best Actor Oscar nomination, the first Spaniard to receive the honor, setting in motion his ascent up Hollywood's A-list. In two new films-the gritty Spanish urban drama Mondays in the Sun and John Malkovich's directorial debut, the English-language political thriller The Dancer Upstairs-Bardem's quiet dignity and powers of transformation are once again on ample display, as he takes audiences on separate, though not dissimilar, journeys to the murky outer banks of human experience. Here he talks with Malkovich.

JOHN MALKOVICH: Hey, man.

JAVIER BARDEM: Nice to meet you!

JM: [laughs] How are you? Long time, no hear. Now, tell me, Javier, do you have something planned-your next film?

JB: No. There are scripts coming from the States that I don't like very much, and in Spain, the film industry-I don't know if I can even call it that, because we don't really have an industry-is going really badly this year. So I have no idea what my next step will be.

JM: When you read a screenplay, is there a particular thing that makes you want to do it?

JB: I suppose. And it's different when I read something in English from when I read something in Spanish. In Spanish I feel capable of portraying many kinds of characters. When I read in English, I need to see that there is a character to build. I pay attention to the physicality of it, to the body language, to try to create some kind of behavior that's not close to my own, so I can be surrounded by elements besides the language. And I also need to feel that the movie is worth watching. Nowadays, you have to spend a lot of time and energy promoting a movie, so if I'm not in love with a script, I'd rather not do it.

JM: When we worked on The Dancer Upstairs, you were very studious about the script. You knew it inside and out. You had a lot of questions and observations. We went through it line by line. Do you do that with other directors?

JB: Yes, completely, because I'm some kind of obsessed freak. An actor either just shows up and acts, or he is an obsessed motherfucker. [laughs] I am the second.

JM: You are in a certain way, Javier, but it seemed to me that your questions were about the character's part in the work as a whole. Now, our readers may not know that your mother [Pilar Bardem] is a very gifted and well-known stage actress, your siblings, Carlos and Monica, are actors, and your uncle [Juan Antonio Bardem] was a director. Did you grow up around this kind of work?

JB: Yes, since I was very little. Because my mother was doing theater, I started hanging around all the theaters in Spain when I was three or four years old. And my main memories from childhood-I don't know what Freud would say about this-are of my mother throwing up before opening night and then, one minute after she stepped onstage, becoming an animal. I didn't understand why she suffered so much at first and then had so much fun. I suppose my resistance to doing theater comes from that.

I didn't even want to become an actor. I wanted to be a painter, but I was lazy. I started working as an extra on movies just to make some money and keep on with my painting lessons, but one day I realized I'd make more money in movies than by painting in the street, which is what I was doing when I was 17,18.

JM: You mean painting on sidewalks, or graffiti, or murals, or what?

JE: Painting faces, portraits of people, which I was very good at at one time. But now I've completely lost my art.

JM: When your mother sees your films, is she critical or does she just say, "It's wonderful"?

JB: Well, when she saw me in [Bigas Luna's] Huevos de Oro [Golden Balls, 1 993]-in which I was naked and having sex-she was like, "Okay, I like it. You have a career here, but maybe you should try to do another kind of role."

JM: "You've got a career in porno. Now what?" But that wasn't your first film with Bigas Luna, was it?

JB: No, the first one was Las Edades de Lulu [The Ages of Lulu, 1990].

JM: Wasn't that the one where you had a sort of-

JB: -A sadomasochist kind of thing, exactly. I was working with my mother on that film, and on the first day of shooting-the first day of shooting in my life-I was in my underwear, dressed as a woman, punching a woman's head against the wall, while my mother (continued from page 100) who was playing a whore, was screaming, "Don't kill her! Don't kill her!" I thought, This will create a nice aJMosphere in my family.