Why He's No. 84

Javier Bardem is an Academy Award-winning actor known for his roles in No Country For Old Men (2007), Collateral (2004) and Goya's Ghosts (2006), not to mention slews of Spanish films. He was the first Spanish actor to be awarded an Oscar, and he's received tons of additional accolades, including four Goya Awards, two Venice Film Festival Awards, a Golden Globe Award for Best Supporting Actor and a Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Male Actor in a Supporting Role. We know more great things are to come for Javier Bardem.

Back Stage

Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem (born March 1, 1969) is a two-time Academy Award-nominated, Golden Globe-, SAG- and BAFTA Award- winning Spanish actor. He has made over two dozen films in his native country, but became an international star with his starring role in the critically acclaimed Before Night Falls. With this role, he became the first Spanish actor to receive an Academy Award nomination. Bardem won the Golden Globe, Screen Actors Guild Award and BAFTA for his performance in No Country For Old Men, and was also nominated for Best Supporting Actor at the 80th Academy Awards. Bardem was born in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria, the son of Carlos Encinas and the actress Pilar Bardem. Bardem comes from a long line of filmmakers and actors who have been working since the earliest days of Spanish cinema; he is the grandson of actors Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro, and the nephew of screenwriter and director Juan Antonio Bardem. Both his older brother and older sister, Carlos and Mónica Bardem, are also actors. His film debut was at the age of six in the film El Pícaro (The Scoundrel) and he appeared in several television series before turning to painting and, eventually, athletics. Before acting professionally, Bardem was a member of the Spanish national rugby team. Bardem starred in his first major motion picture, The Ages of Lulu, when he was 20. In 1992, he made his first international hit with Jamón, Jamón, which also starred Penélope Cruz. After starring in roughly two dozen films in his native country, he would eventually land his international breakthrough performance role in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls in 2000, as Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actor for the role, the first time for a Spaniard. This also marked Bardem's first English-language speaking role. In 2002 he starred in John Malkovich's directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs. Bardem won the Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in 2004's Mar Adentro, released in the United States as The Sea Inside, in which he portrayed assisted-suicide activist Ramón Sampedro. That year he also made a brief appearance as a vicious crime lord who summons Tom Cruise's hitman to do the dirty work of dispatching witnesses, in Michael Mann's crime drama Collateral, which also starred Jamie Foxx. In the Coen Brothers' 2007 film No Country for Old Men, based upon the novel of the same name, he plays chilling sociopathic hitman Anton Chigurh. For that role, he won a Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild award for Best Supporting Actor and also won the Critic's Choice Award for Best Supporting Actor as well as the 2008 BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor. He is currently in the running for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also appears in the 2007 film adaptation of the classic Colombian novel Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. He will star in Woody Allen's film Vicky Cristina Barcelona. Bardem is currently in talks to play fictional filmmaker Guido Contini in the film adaptation of the Tony Award-winning musical Nine. The part of Guido Contini had previously been played by Raul Julia in the original 1982 production and more recently by Antonio Banderas in the Tony Award-winning 2003 revival also starring Mary Stuart Masterson, Jane Krakowski, Chita Rivera, and Laura Benanti.

The film is to be directed by DGA winner Rob Marshall and is scheduled for release in 2008. Bardem does not know how to drive and consistently refers to himself as a "worker" and not an actor. Following the legalization of same-sex marriage in Spain in 2005, Bardem incited controversy when he stated that if he were gay, he would "get married tomorrow, just to fuck with the church" (mañana mismo, sólo para joder a la Iglesia). Bardem was recently honored at the 2007 Gotham Awards in New York City for his life's work. The Gotham Awards' focus is independent film and is produced by IFP, the Independent Feature Project. Bardem is currently in a relationship with Jamón, Jamón co-star Penélope Cruz. In an interview for time-out he stated that he lost his virginity at the age of 19.

Forcaste

Determined to avert a beefcake image, he refused similar subsequent roles and has gone on to win acclaim for his ability to appear almost unrecognizable from film to film. With over 25 movies and numerous awards under his belt, it is Javier's stirring, passionate performance as the persecuted Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (2000) that will longbe remembered as his breakthrough role. He received five Best Actor awards and a Best Actor Oscar nomination for his portrayal of a strong-willed man who survived censorship, imprisonment, and homosexual intolerance for the privilege to write freely, only to commit suicide at age 47 in New York, ending a battle with AIDS.