THE ACTOR AS ARCHITECT OF A ROLE, NY TIMES

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By LARRY ROHTER

Published: December 29, 2010, NY TIMES

As a boy, from the age of about 9 until well into his teens, the actor Javier Bardem would often help his mother, Pilar, an actress well known in Spain, learn her roles. At their home in Madrid she would hand him a script and then read her lines out loud while he read all the others.

“I watched my mother act all my life, and yet I wasn’t attracted to acting as such,” he recalled recently. “What attracted me was my mother’s effort, her dedication, the seriousness of the work, the desire to do something. But what that something was didn’t matter to me. It could just as well have been painting or writing or even rugby.”

Nevertheless, at the age of 41, Mr. Bardem finds himself one of the world’s most admired actors, with one Academy Award to his name — for best supporting actor in Joel and Ethan Coen’s “No Country for Old Men” — and the possibility of another looming on the horizon. Leading directors regularly offer him juicy parts, and he has worked in widely varied roles with many of the most distinguished names in film, including Pedro Almodóvar, Woody Allen, Milos Forman and Terrence Malick.

“I think the best actors are those who are not only talented, but work harder than anybody else, and that’s Javy,” said the director and painter Julian Schnabel, who gave Mr. Bardem his breakout English-language role in “Before Night Falls” a decade ago. “That’s his barometer. He’s got a deep interior life going on, but he’s so immersed in the thing he does, with such concentration, with so many different buttons he can press, from humor to despair, that he becomes that, and it doesn’t even look like he is acting.”

But nothing, according to Mr. Bardem, has ever tested him — physically and mentally — or required greater effort and dedication more than “Biutiful,” a drama, directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, which won Mr. Bardem the best actor award when it was first shown at Cannes last May and opened in New York and Los Angeles on Wednesday. “For me ‘Biutiful’ is going to represent a before and after,” he said in an interview last month in New York.

In “Biutiful,” set entirely in Barcelona, Mr. Bardem plays Uxbal, a petty criminal and doting father of two whose world, built around immigrant smuggling and the manufacture of fake luxury goods, begins to collapse when he learns he is seriously ill. Mr. González Iñárritu, whose previous films include “21 Grams” and “Babel,” said he wrote the part specifically for Mr. Bardem, the first time he had ever cast a role in advance.

“Physically Javier possesses an attraction that is tremendously magnetic and kinetic,” Mr. González Iñárritu said. “On the one hand, he has the primitive force of the minotaur, the strength of a bull crossed with a man, along with a face that contains the essence of the Mediterranean, that looks like it could be that of a Caesar on a Roman coin. But he also has the sensibility of a poet, an inner subtlety and emotional baggage, and it is those two sets of qualities that made him so particularly fitting to play this character.”

Mr. González Iñárritu shoots his films with scenes in chronological order, which is unusual in the movie business, and has been known to demand 50 or more takes from his actors. Mr. Bardem knew that going into “Biutiful” but still found the process unusually exhausting, and not just because he injured his back in a sequence that required him to lift another actor and was in pain throughout the second half of the five-month shoot.

Because the scenes were shot in the order in which they play and his character has to come to terms with the possibility of his own demise, Mr. Bardem said he had to “keep holding in the emotional intensity.” Or as Mr. González Iñárritu put it, “Javier had to find a balance while surrendering totally to a role that required him to be completely charged up while showing very little, and that, emotionally, is very arduous.”

Mr. Bardem often seems to be acting intuitively, especially in critically acclaimed films in which his characters face death, like “Biutiful,” “The Sea Inside” and “Before Night Falls.” But he describes his work as meticulously plotted in advance and in detail. Asked about a pair of especially moving moments in “Biutiful” in which his character, wrestling with mortality, does not speak at all, Mr. Bardem reached for a sheet of paper and proceeded to diagram the stages into which he had divided the two scenes.

“A character is like a building,” he explained. “I’ve never studied architecture, but I imagine that first you have to prepare the plans, lay down the base, a solid base that has to do with the character, and from there build it up. Once this is all clear, you can add the details: I want blue walls, I want wood floors, I want him to speak this way or move like that. But first you have to think.”

Another sign of the seriousness with which he approaches his craft is that, despite the growing acclaim for his body of work, he continues to study with an acting coach, Juan Carlos Corazza, an Argentine. They have worked together nearly 20 years, since the beginning of Mr. Bardem’s career. In a telephone interview from Madrid, where he lives, Mr. Corazza said that Mr. Bardem not only consults with him as he prepares for each role but also attends his classes and workshops, where he is sometimes matched with beginning actors.

“Part of the work in preparing for his roles is always at the table, where we analyze the script, each word and each phrase, to try to understand the mind of that other person,” he explained. But Mr. Corazza also has Mr. Bardem do exercises designed to “prepare the canvas for painting” by “identifying and stripping away the habits, clichés and artificial aspects between him and the character, so he has the courage to find a freedom in his character.”

In a sense Mr. Bardem seems almost to have been predestined for a life as an actor. In addition to his mother, both of his maternal grandparents also were prominent actors, and one of his uncles, Juan Antonio Bardem, was a distinguished screenwriter and director (and Spanish Communist Party leader), perhaps best known for the film “Death of a Cyclist”

But Mr. Bardem tried at first to resist being pulled into the family trade. He played rugby as a boy, relentlessly and passionately, which gave him the broken bones to show for it and instilled the sense of teamwork that directors uniformly praise. When it came time to choose a career, however, he initially decided to go to art school, intending to become a painter.

To earn money for his studies he did small acting jobs on the side, adopting his mother’s surname rather than that of his father, Encinas, as would have been more customary. But in his art classes he discovered that while he seemed to have talent, the only thing he wanted to draw was “faces, eyes, expressions and bodies,” not landscapes or abstract works.

He concluded that his primary interest really was how human beings express emotions. And at that point, around the age of 18, the Bardem family tradition, and all the years observing his mother, gave him something to draw on and inspire himself.

“I didn’t like having to read the other characters,” he recalled. “What fascinated me was listening to her. She’d have a great script with a monologue and would begin to speak and then stop and correct herself. She’d go back to the beginning, and that’s the way it was for the entire work. So after an hour or so of the technical aspects, the memorization, she would fly. She knew the text, she had control, the actress would appear, and off she would go.”

The lesson he drew from that experience, he said, was that “to get to the art, one must work very hard.” He added: “Art doesn’t exist just as talent. It exists as effort, work and judgment.”

In keeping with that philosophy, Mr. Bardem said, nowadays he chooses roles based not on their size or the chances for acclaim they might offer, but on the degree of the challenge they present. That’s the kind of thing that actors always say of course. But Mr. Bardem’s track record suggests he means it.

The director Fernando León de Aranoa, a friend of Mr. Bardem’s, recalled: “When we were getting ready for ‘Mondays in the Sun,’ ” a Spanish film about unemployed shipyard workers, “he had just been nominated for an Oscar for the first time, for ‘Before Night Falls,’ and every time his phone rang, it was with a proposal to be part of a production that, in terms of money and fame, was more important than mine. I thought it was logical that he would take one of those, but he said to me, ‘I really like this character’ and remained firm. That’s an honesty that I like.”

If anything, Mr. Bardem may be more focused than ever. In the past, he admitted, he played as hard as he worked. But his recent marriage to the actress Penélope Cruz, with whom he worked first on the 1992 hit “Jamón, Jamón” and most recently on Mr. Allen’s “Vicky Cristina Barcelona,” and the impending birth of their first child seem to have brought a stability and depth to his work and life.

“I think that professionally he is now in a place where he feels greater security and a larger sense of freedom to do less, and be more the character and not force things,” Mr. Corazza, his acting coach, said. “It’s a very rich time for him right now personally too, a moment in which he is enjoying love and its fruits and has reached a level of maturity in which he thinks less of himself and more of others.”