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 Entertainment | December 2007 
Hollywood's Latest Villain
 Peter Mitchell - News Limited
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| | Spanish actor Javier Bardem is so convincing playing Anton Chigurh in the new thriller No Country For Old Men he is the outright favourite to win the best supporting actor Oscar at February's Oscars. |
A new villain has arrived in Hollywood, more ruthless and cold-blooded than Hannibal Lecter, a dark side blacker than Darth Vader and creepier than Norman Bates.
He has a thick, moppish haircut, says little and kills his victims with a device farmers use to snuff out cows.
Take note: his name is Anton Chigurh.
Spanish actor Javier Bardem is so convincing playing Chigurh in the new thriller No Country For Old Men he is the outright favourite to win the best supporting actor Oscar at February's Oscars.
The film, directed by Academy Award-winning film-making brothers, Joel and Ethan Cohen, and based on the bookwritten by Pulitzer Prize winning author Cormac McCarthy, is also a frontrunner for best picture.
Bardem shares the screen with Tommy Lee Jones, Josh Brolin and Woody Harrelson but it is the Spaniard who leaves audiences gasping with his stone cold performance as the killer tracking down $US2.4 million in cash stolen when a drug bust in barren Texas wasteland near the Mexican border goes wrong.
Thankfully, Bardem in person is nothing like Chigurh. He sits on a sofa in a Beverly Hills hotel suite, a cigarette in his right hand and feet resting on a coffee table. The moppish hair his gone, replaced by a short haircut.
Instead of Chigurh's dead eyes, Bardem's on this day are wide and alive.
Dressed in a black T-shirt and jeans, he is the epitome of cool.
He hears my Australian accent.
"Oh my God, I am so sorry about the Wallabies," Bardem says, still devastated by Australia's early exit from this year's World Cup.
The 38-year-old explains how he is a crazed rugby union fan, loves the Australian team and was a former captain of the Spanish national team.
Spain, a country where soccer rules, has a rugby team?
"Yeah I know," he laughs.
"Playing rugby in Spain is about as weird as being a bullfighter in Japan."
Bardem, at 183cm tall and lean, played prop for the Spain's senior team, a position at the elite level that usually requires shorter, stocky men with necks and legs as thick as tree trunks.
He says he is lucky his face did not receive too much damage and his ears did not turn into cauliflowers during drubbings his team received in games against England, Italy, Russia and Portugal.
He never fulfilled a wish to play Australia or his other favourite team, New Zealand's All Blacks.
"Spain was not a very good team when I played for them," he says.
"We didn't win many games."
Luckily for Bardem he does not have to rely on rugby to earn a living.
He has been one of Europe's leading actors and sex symbols since 1992 when he played a stud in the Spanish black comedy, Jamon, jamon.
For years Hollywood studios attempted to entice him with big dollars to play villains in $US200 million action films, but he knocked them back.
He caught their attention with his best actor Oscar nominated performance in 2000 for Before Night Falls, a biopic about Cuban poet and novelist, Reinaldo Arenas.
The studios were also enthralled by Bardem's performance in the 2004 Spanish language drama, The Sea Inside, a story about a quadriplegic who fought for 30 years to end his life with dignity through euthanasia.
Hollywood director Michael Mann did entice him to play a small role in Collateral, the 2004 thriller starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx, but it took the Cohens, whose unique movies include Fargo, Raising Arizona, The Man Who Wasn't There and O Brother Where Art Thou, to sign Bardem for a leading role.
No Country for Old Men, however, is far from a big budget Hollywood film. It was shot in rural Texas and New Mexico for about $US10 million.
"They are so obvious," Bardem, explaining the scripts for Hollywood films he has rejected in the past, said.
"I may do one, maybe, later on. But, it has to have a reason to be made."
"Money is not a good enough reason."
"You have to ask, 'What do you want from your career?' and what I want is to get old doing what I want to do and some of those big Hollywood films are not worthy of being made."
"This (No Country For Old Men) is the closest I could get to playing a villain."
"I don't want to play a villain for a long time now."
What US film critics found most astounding about Bardem's portrayal of Chigurh was his less is more approach.
"In the book Chigurh is described in great detail psychologically and even philosophically, but not physically," Bardem said. "So, it was really wide open to interpretation."
"It was up to me and the Cohens to come up with someone who is numb, without being numb, otherwise you will be watching the Terminator."
"We tried to find a place where you humanise him with some faults."
"The flaws I found were I thought he would find trouble dealing with things of day to day life, so he would have trouble with a phone or opening an envelope."
"When it comes to killing, he's like a shark. Killing is the only thing he knows what to do."
Bardem knew he may have a bit of trouble attracting the opposite sex with his Chigurh hairstyle.
"A friend of mine came to New Mexico the first day I had that haircut and he said 'Man, you are going to have a problem for the next three months'," Bardem laughed. "I said 'Yeah, three months in New Mexico with this haircut, it's going to be bad'." |
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