YOU might want to look upon 2008 as El Año de Bardem. Hollywood certainly seems to have finally realised that, despite playing the anti-heroes of life, Javier Bardem has everything that movies could ever ask for in a leading man.
A rugby player's face, a poet's sensibility and an ability to leap off the screen won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar last month for No Country For Old Men's Anton Chigurh, a quietly purposeful killer with a peculiar slaughterhouse weapon and a stubbornly immobile hairstyle.
"People ask, 'How was wearing that wig?' It is not a wig, it was my hair," he says in mock earnest. "For the character it worked pretty good I think – but it was a curse because I had to wake up every day with that hair. I was working only one or two days per week. The rest of the week, I was free, walking with that hair. No matter what you do, how much grease you put on that hair, it always stayed the same shape. The Coens still owe me."
Javier Bardem speaks from the heart and mind, conjuring charming new English hybrids such as "contradictorial" as he expresses a fan's delight over his Oscar experiences. It was his second trip to the awards and this time, as in 2001, he brought his mother, Pilar, herself an actress.
"It's crazy to put a tuxedo on at 11am, then go through the red-carpet bit for three hours, doing TV after TV after TV," he says in his rapid, accented English.
He recalls entering the Kodak theatre as being "like in the video store, seeing all these actors you know walking and talking to each other. And when they say your name, you feel very honoured."
Having terrified audiences in No Country For Old Men with the remorseless Chigurh, portraying romantic obsession as the star of Love In The Time Of Cholera must seem almost quaint, but Bardem was so keen to play Florentino, the broken-hearted swain looking for love in all the wrong places, that he agreed to begin the month-long rehearsal process within a week after wrapping up filming with the Coen brothers.
"Cholera was like a refreshing bath after the grit of Old Men," he says. Or maybe a rather hot one. The film was shot in Colombia during its notoriously humid summer, and it was a battle to prevent Bardem's old-age hair and make-up prosthetics dissolving in the 95% humidity. "I'd step out onto the street and my face would melt off."
Bardem first read Cholera aged 14 when he discovered his sister's copy lying around, and although an ailing Garcia Marquez never made it to set, he called Bardem before filming began to offer words of advice on Florentino, a diehard romantic who waits more than half a century for his beloved Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno).
"He told me, 'I always saw Florentino as a person who has been beaten so many times that he walks like those stray dogs that are scared,' and that's what I tried to portray."
Mind you, walking is not the first trait one might associate with Florentino as he waits for Fermina to love him again, as she did when they were young, because while he waits, he eases his torment by having sex with everything that moves: a total of 622 affairs.
"There's a line in the book where Florentino says I could have been unfaithful to her, but never disloyal," responds Bardem genially. "I mean, that's something you'd never use to defend yourself against your wife, because she'd kill you, but in the language of Garcia Marquez, you truly understand what he means."
Bardem, who has been quietly dating Penelope Cruz since the end of last summer and causing quite the sensation back in Spain, accepts that Florentino's athletic definition of celibacy may be a stumbling point for pedants. He isn't convinced about the romantic notion of waiting for love either. "I'll tell you why waiting for love doesn't work. You change, the other person changes. Life is not static. You wish you had those romantic feelings that you felt at age 19 when you looked at a beautiful girl. What I admire is marriages that have lasted 50 years. How do they keep the love alive for all that time?"
Born into a renowned acting dynasty in 1969, Bardem landed his first role at four when his mother found him a small role in the mini-series El Picaro.
"Because of my family, I saw since I was born everything in this business," he says. "The ups, downs, my mother having no work then suddenly getting a play, people saying you are great and then saying you are nothing. To survive, you cannot depend on other people's opinions. You need to respect yourself and not listen to anyone else."
At one point he was drawn to the idea of becoming an artist and studied at the School of Arts and Crafts in Madrid, and although he now enjoys the kind of celebrity in Spain normally afforded to soccer players, Bardem grew up playing rugby, making it as far as the national squad. "It's a bit like being a star bullfighter in Japan," he says with a smile. "But I guess you can say I was pretty good at it."
Early in his career, Bardem was usually typecast as reckless hunks in steamy films such as Jamon, Jamon (1992) where he seduces a teenage Penelope Cruz and kills his love rival with a ham. Increasingly typecast, he quit acting and waited tables in Madrid before returning to roles such as the junkie boyfriend of a prostitute in Numbered Days, a detective in The Detective And Death, and even sending up his reputation by playing an out-of-work heart-throb actor in Mouth To Mouth. If there was a common thread, it was that Bardem radiated a shifting sexuality that refused to get caught in macho stereotypes.
It was Julian Schnabel's indie drama Before Night Falls in 2000, however, that catapulted Bardem to the forefront of critics' best-of lists, in a role originally intended for Benicio Del Toro. Bardem, cast in a supporting role, was offered the part, despite the fact his English was marginal at that point, and he was told to lose 38lb. His nuanced, poignant performance as the gay Cuban dissident Arenas, who committed suicide in 1990, earned him the Best Actor award at the Venice Film Festival that year, and an Oscar nomination, the first for any Spanish actor. He lost to Russell Crowe then opted "to refuse all the jobs I was offered. They were all action movies, or Latin lover parts, less than caricatures. I came back to Spain, to my roots and language. I did Mondays In The Sun, which is very political and I think the best movie I have made, about the unemployed in Spain."
This time post-Oscar, with his dark equine features broadcast into living rooms from Bangkok to Barcelona, he already has a wave of interesting work lined up. He has just finished the Woody Allen film Vicky Cristina Barcelona with Scarlett Johansson. "I like the creation of characters but Woody Allen forces you to go back to the beginning in a way. At the moment that appeals to me a lot," he says.
He's also in deep discussions about the movie musical 9 with Sophia Loren and fellow Oscar winner Marion Cotillard, taking the role played on Broadway by Antonio Banderas, the star who inspired Bardem to go to America in the first place.
"But there is a difference between me and an American actor. An American actor has the need to make it in his country. I don't have that. I have my career in my country, and if something good happens in America, I'll do it, and there are many great directors here I'd like to work with. But if that doesn't happen, it doesn't mean that I don't have a career. I already have one – in Spain."
• Love In The Time of Cholera is released on March 22
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