Awaiting His Crossover Moment

Let’s just say that Javier Bardem isn’t altogether thrilled by the prospect of being the next conquistador of Hollywood. The endless rounds of photo ops and meet-and-greets and morning shows are a little surreal, and the Spanish actor would prefer to relocate to a calmer universe.

“All this--I think it’s called press junkets,” says Bardem, his husky accent on the “junk.” “It happens in Spain, but it happens for three days. Here you’re talking with people on and on and on and on and on. I mean it’s great,” he says, sounding far from convinced. “But it’s a lot of noise for me.”

This “noise”--Rosie, Charlie Rose, Vanity Fair, Talk magazine--is standard fare for those who are nominated for an Academy Award. And so, on this morning, the star of “Before Night Falls” sits at a window table at the restaurant of New York’s Essex House Hotel. Brooding. Outside, the dog walkers and doormen of Central Park South shiver in the chill; inside it is warm and cheerful and the winter sunlight dances off the bone china and eggs Benedict and fruit plates. Bardem talks. He considers the utter weirdness of fame. But what Javier Bardem really wants most at this juncture is a Marlboro. He’s jonesing pretty hard, while understanding that he will be denied this simple morning pleasure thanks to New York’s byzantine anti-smoking laws.The smoldering dark eyes that made him one of Spain’s major heartthrobs droop; the muscular shoulders underneath the faded green rugby sweater sag with exhaustion. Let’s just say that a cigarette would go a long way toward quelling his inclination, growing by the minute, to blow out of this interview and head back up to bed, where it’s dark and quiet and nobody knows his name.

*

JAVIER BARDEM IS A STAR--IN SPAIN. THE scion of one of that country’s most prominent theatrical families (his mother, actress Pilar Bardem, has been compared to Geraldine Page; his uncle, Juan Antonio Bardem, was one of Spain’s most celebrated directors), the 31-year-old actor has made 16 films released in the last decade and won several European film awards, including two Goyas (Spain’s Academy Award). In 1998 Bardem won the Public’s Award for Best European Actor at the Berlin Film Festival for his work in “Perdita Durango” and the Audience Award for Best Actor at the European Film Awards for “Live Flesh.” Last year he won best actor at the Venice Film Festival for his work in “Before Night Falls,” as well as the best actor award from the U.S. National Board of Review and National Society of Film Critics. He has the kind of diverse film resume that, were he to have established his acting career in the United States, might prompt comparison to someone like Sean Penn. As it stands, Bardem has been known to American audiences--if at all--through the art house films of Pedro Almodovar (“Live Flesh”) and Bigas Luna, whose 1992 comedy, “Jamon, Jamon” made Bardem a star. In Spain.

Now, with his performance as gay Cuban novelist and poet Reinaldo Arenas in Julian Schnabel’s “Before Night Falls,” Bardem is being lauded by critics worldwide and applauded by actors ranging from Gary Oldman to Jack Nicholson, who recently arranged a special private screening of the film. He’s met with Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese and Adrian Lyne and Ridley Scott. His stature as Hollywood’s latest foreign import has been solidified by the best actor Oscar nomination and a Golden Globe nomination, and a few turns on E! haven’t hurt either. And yet.

“As long as I can remember, I’ve never gotten into my bed, closed my eyes and dreamed of Hollywood,” Bardem says. “I dreamed, with many actors from Hollywood, [of working with] Sean Penn, Al Pacino. Now, I’ve met Al Pacino. I’ve met Sean Penn. It’s great; they’re amazing actors. But I’ve never had the dream of ‘I want to be a star in Hollywood, no.’ ” Bardem stares pensively at the barren trees in Central Park.

We are meeting in mid-January, just after the Golden Globes, after Javier Bardem’s dark, equine features have been broadcast live into living rooms from Seattle to Bangkok to Madrid.

“There’s 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 here, 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.”

Spain, culturally adrift during the 30-odd years of Franco’s reign, is currently having a worldwide movie moment. Think Almodovar, Penelope Cruz, Antonio Banderas. “Spanish cinema has been going great for years and years now, [and] it’s taken a while for [the] U.S. to catch up,” says Dennis Bartok of the American Cinematheque, whose Spanish cinema series each February regularly out-grosses all their other film series. “[Spain has] all the things that Hollywood loves: sex, death, great-looking stars, talented actors and directors. [There’s] just a tremendous talent pool.”

Take Pedro Almodovar, who’s been the darling of the American art house circuit since his 1988 breakthrough film, “Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown” (starring a very young Antonio Banderas.) His film “All About My Mother” won the 1999 Oscar for best foreign-language film. The director, who has flirted with making an English-language film, has yet to do so. His next project will be “The Bad Education,” a semi-autobiographical drama set in La Mancha, Spain. Or consider 27-year-old writer-director Alejandro Amenabar, who is finishing his first English-language feature, “The Others,” starring Nicole Kidman, and whose dreamy psychological thriller, “Open Your Eyes,” is being re-shot in the United States by Cameron Crowe as “Vanilla Sky,” with Penelope Cruz in the role she originated in the Spanish version.

Film scholar Richard Pena, program director of the Film Society of Lincoln Center in New York, points out that Spain has gone from making 35 films per year to more than 100 films per year in the past decade, evidence of a new generation of filmmakers who are more attuned to the box office, overseas marketing and making movies that are attractive to younger audiences.

Hollywood, says Bartok, has long had an eye for foreign talent. Remember the 1960s crop of Europeans--Federico Fellini, Sophia Loren, Marcello Mastroianni, Ingmar Bergman, Claude Lelouch, Costa-Gavras, among others?

“I think what you’re seeing now is a growing global sensibility that’s apparent in every aspect of the culture,” Bartok adds. “Hollywood is becoming more porous, so foreign actors can come here and get noticed. Look at Jackie Chan. Or John Woo. Or Guy Ritchie. In fact, I find it odd that it’s taken so long for Javier Bardem to get noticed, because he has such volcanic talent.”

That’s not to say that the trickle of Spanish talent will become a flood. “Hollywood is always looking for the Next Big Thing, and it loves to create movie stars,” says Jon Gordon, executive vice president of production at Miramax Films, which co-produced “All The Pretty Horses,” starring Cruz and Matt Damon. Cruz had to test twice for her role in “Horses.” “[Director] Billy Bob Thornton and Miramax fought hard for her, and on some level there was a resistance, not so much because she was Spanish but because she was unknown.” says Gordon. Now, he hastens to add, it’s different. Cruz, who has two more English-language films in the works (John Madden’s “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” co-starring Nicolas Cage, and “Blow,” co-starring Johnny Depp) has a more established presence in Hollywood. But, says Ignacio Darnaude, senior vice president of marketing at Buena Vista International, the foreign arm of Disney, “It’s still not that easy for a studio to accept Spanish actors. Hollywood doesn’t like to take risks, [it likes] proven entities, and someone who comes from Spain is not a proven entity. Penelope Cruz is an astounding actress. American audiences haven’t seen the best of her by a long shot. But she was still a risk, although today she is somewhat less so.”

*

HOLLYWOOD HAS BEEN AWARE OF JAVIER BARDEM EVER SINCE HIS BREAKTHROUGH appearance in “Jamon, Jamon,” a hit in Spain. But the actor didn’t care for the offers that came his way. “Action hero roles,” he shrugs. Roles that the other Spanish actor might play, the former Almodovar star whom Madonna yearned for in “Truth or Dare,” who married a famous actress, who is now such a huge celebrity that his sizable acting talent is almost dwarfed by his equally sizable gossip quotient. It’s a concern for Bardem, who has been compared, almost relentlessly, to Antonio Banderas since Bardem starred in “Live Flesh,” Almodovar’s 1997 film. It was a role that Banderas, an early Almodovar star, might very well have played if he hadn’t already crossed the Atlantic.

Bardem bristles at the comparisons. “He’s Spanish, I’m Spanish. He worked with Almodovar, I worked with Almodovar--to that point, fine. But beyond that, I feel that the question itself is disrespectful, to myself as well as to Antonio, and it’s just marketing, you know what I mean? If I’m not the next Antonio Banderas, people who don’t know me at all won’t know how to catalog me.”

He sighs.

“I guess it’s fine. All it is, really, is finding a name for a product in order to sell it, and that’s the law of the market.” Bardem plays with the menu, takes a sip of soda. “Let me ask you a question,” he says. “Do you think we can smoke in the bar?”

*

BARDEM WAS ONLY 22 WHEN LUNA CAST HIM AS RAOUL, THE MACHO truck driver-turned-underwear-model in “Jamon, Jamon.” In provincial Spain, Raoul dreams of becoming a bullfighter, seduces a teenage Penelope Cruz (the film also launched her career), and then kills his romantic rival with a ham. For a time Bardem quit acting and waited tables in Madrid. When he returned to film in 1994, it was to play the junkie boyfriend of a prostitute in Imanol Uribe’s “D’as Contados,” for which he won the best supporting actor Goya in 1995. Since then, Bardem has taken on a wide variety of roles in Spanish films: the gay doctor in “Second Skin”; an out-of-work actor in Manuel Gomez Pereira’s screwball comedy “Mouth to Mouth”; a paraplegic cop in Almodovar’s “Live Flesh” and a Santeria-practicing con artist in Alex de la Iglesia’s “Perdita Durango” (which, released in 1998 in Europe, failed to get a theatrical release in the United States.) If there’s a characteristic common to all these roles, it’s a certain sexuality that doesn’t get caught up in macho stereotypes.

This is common trait in contemporary Spanish cinema, notes USC film professor Marsha Kinder, author of “Blood Cinema” and “Refiguring Spain.” “There’s a kind of sexual mobility in Spain, a desire to flaunt rules, which you see in Almodovar’s films, and is one of the reasons why you don’t have hesitation by masculine stars to play gay characters. Javier Bardem is a good representative of that. You’re not really sure what his identity is: Homosexual? Hetero? Bi? Whatever it is, it’s extreme.”

Bardem, says “Before Night Falls” director Schnabel, can make any man doubt his masculinity.

“In ‘Jamon, Jamon,’ his role was totally vulgar, tacky, funny. He had no moral code at all. But there was something about the character that was honest--or direct. More than honest. Then, in ‘D’as Contados,’ he played a junkie, and he was so believable in that role, it was obvious that this guy could totally disappear.”

The role of Arenas, who suffered years of persecution and imprisonment in Cuba for his homosexuality, was originally intended for Benicio Del Toro. When Del Toro dropped out of “Before Night Falls,” Schnabel, noticing the uncanny resemblance between Bardem (who’d been cast in a supporting role) and Arenas, offered Bardem the part.

Bardem, whose English was only marginal at the time, had to learn English in addition to Cuban Spanish. He lost 38 pounds, whittling his hefty frame to a more slender one.

Born into a family of Communists (Bardem’s uncle, Juan Antonio, created some of the most important anti-Franco films of the 1950s and spent several years in jail for it), Bardem was at first wary of taking on a role so overtly critical of Cuba, a country he’d idealized since childhood. So he went there to wander the streets of Havana.

“He needed to know what he was being used for, if he could support it ideologically,” says Schnabel. “He took three months to reflect on his decision to do this film and to really decide that he wanted to do it.”

The result, according to some of Arenas’ colleagues, was more of a reincarnation than a performance. “He became Reinaldo Arenas,” Schnabel insists. But Bardem, who is relentlessly self-critical, gives his performance a six.

“I told him he was out of his mind,” Schnabel says. “Al Pacino even called him from New York in the middle of the night to tell him how great he was.”

Now, with Oscar calling (and the ability to command $1 million per film), Bardem, who recently signed with UTA, a talent agency that also handles Harrison Ford, Kevin Costner, Jim Carrey and Charlize Theron, faces a new reality. Will he accept major film roles, if offered?

“First of all they have to offer me those jobs. Second, I have to read them and say they are good jobs for me. I’m already typecast because I’m Spanish, but, I mean look at me: I have this boxer’s face, I am not brown-skinned, my hair is not black. My teeth are not white. I’m not what they want me to be, and by that I mean I’m not a typical Latin person.”

He’s not, in other words, Antonio Banderas.

“I just want a role to play that has something to say to the audience and to myself. If that doesn’t happen, I have my country.”

And Spain, indeed, has him. We are in the bar--Bardem’s yen for a cigarette has gotten the best of him--and the actor is contemplating the crush of paparazzi awaiting his return to Madrid in just a few hours.

“It’s like, oh, of course: This man is the next Antonio Banderas! And now this nomination, the way they’re all talking about me. It’s a little scary.”

But Spain is still safer than Hollywood. Bardem has no plans to move any time soon, unless “I feel I need to, to perfect my English. But not L.A. I could move to New York, maybe, but L.A., no. First of all, I don’t drive. And second of all, because they have this crazy thing about not smoking anywhere, and I do smoke a lot.” He smiles and lights a cigarette.

Let’s say that Javier Bardem smokes a pack a day. OK, let’s say he smokes more than a pack, and then let’s say we’re going to stop talking about it. We’ll just sit here in the wood-paneled bar, empty and alone and infinitely nicotine-friendly.

This time of insanity will pass, Bardem says. “Then you have to go back to your roots, and belong to where you belong. And I don’t belong to all of this. It’s just for a couple of weeks.”

He leans back, soaking in the silence of the Essex House bar, where it’s quiet and dark and warm. He is Spain’s Next Big Thing, but at least right now, he is also safe: encircled by smoke, savoring the luxury of being, for just these few moments, completely and blissfully alone.