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Archive for the ‘Articles & Interviews’ Category
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August 21, 2008
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Premiere Vicky Cristina Barcelona Article |
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Barcelona Lovers Javier Bardem and Rebecca Hall
The stars of ‘Vicky Cristina Barcelona’ steam up the screen when they’re not channeling Woody Allen’s tragicomic neuroses.
Woody Allen’s latest outing, the sensually sun-drenched Vicky Cristina Barcelona, charmed critics at Cannes with its return to what Woody does best — typically neurotic, upwardly mobile protagonists caught between what they want and what they think they want.
Vicky (Rebecca Hall) has her life all mapped out, down to her impending nuptials with the nebbishy Doug (Chris Messina). Her best friend Cristina, on the other hand, is a restless and nubile wanna-be boho only certain of what she doesn’t want. When the two jet off to Barcelona for their last summer of freedom, they expect to spend a few months resting and enjoying the art of Barcelona. But when the dashing painted Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) makes them an offer they can’t refuse (no matter how much Vicky might want to), their lives become much more complicated indeed. When Juan’s ex-wife, Maria Elena (Penélope Cruz), shows up on his doorstep fresh from a suicide attempt, things get even more confusing, volatile, and sexy.
Fresh off his Oscar-winning turn in No Country For Old Men, Javier Bardem chats exclusively with Premiere.com about working with Woody, why he is nothing like his sexually direct playboy character, and why you won’t see him as Pablo Escobar any time soon. British stage and TV actress Rebecca Hall, who recently had heads turning for her role opposite Christian Bale in The Prestige, talks about acting opposite Hollywood’s sexiest leading man, why her character fears unleashing her passion, and her upcoming role in Ron Howard’s Oscar-bait Frost/Nixon.
… Read the full story »
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August 21, 2008
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Javier Bardem makes acting look like child’s play |
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Javier Bardem remembers the time from his childhood when he realised he was a performer.
“I was playing make-believe like any other kid,” the 39-year-old actor recalled in a phone conversation from his Madrid home. “And there was a moment when something clicked inside that made me aware of myself, that allowed me to watch myself playing from the outside. Up to then play had been unconscious.
“The difference between an actor and anyone else is that awareness of the playing.”
He has been playing ever since, immersing himself in roles so disparate that a casual observer might not realise they’re all done by the same man.
… Read the full story »
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August 15, 2008
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10 Questions for Javier Bardem |
“Thank you, though I don’t know what you mean by unique. It could be a unique horrible voice or a unique beautiful voice. My voice comes from my big neck. No, I don’t sing. I was close to singing in this movie, but I’m a nice boy, and I didn’t want people to suffer.”
Was it exciting or frightening to work with Woody Allen? Pranav Prasad, HONG KONG
Both. There’s excitement because I think he’s a genius, but there’s also the fear of making his work look bad. The excitement also comes from knowing that you have brilliant dialogue coming out of your mouth like jewels.
Are there any actors you’re dying to work with? Kathryn Coulter ALEXANDRIA, VA.
I always say, “I don’t believe in God, I believe in Al Pacino”–and that’s true. If I ever get a phone call saying “Would you like to work with Pacino?” I would go crazy.
Are you ever worried about being typecast? Dan Ostrowski NEW YORK CITY
I’m not worried. I always try different things. My dream would be, when I’m old, to put all of my characters in a room and realize that they can’t talk to each other because they don’t have anything to share. … Read the full story »
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August 8, 2008
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Time Out Chicago Interview: Reign in Spain |
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Javier Bardem plays the lover, Woody Allen–style.
It’s fitting that Javier Bardem, still enjoying his work-free post-Oscar life, calls us from Barcelona: The city provides the setting for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, starring Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson. In Allen’s latest, Bardem plays a Spanish painter entangled in a love quadrangle with two American women and his ex, played by Cruz.
Time Out Chicago: When you and Penélope Cruz speak Spanish to each other in the film, you both visibly change. Are you a different actor in English?
Javier Bardem: We are all different in a foreign language. It’s about memory. When you are speaking your own tongue, a lot of images come to your mind, images of your own life. When you are speaking a foreign language, you don’t have many images.
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August 7, 2008
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Moviehole Interview |
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Javier Bardem may not exactly enjoy doing press, but there was no evidence of any such disdain as the gregarious and cheerful Spanish Oscar winner chatted about his role in the latest Woody Allen-directed, Barcelona-shot romantic comedy “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” - the actor’s first major film since his Oscar-winning turn in “No Country for Old Men”.
Its been quite the rollercoaster ride for the actor, including months of self-promotion in the hope of capturing cinema’s ultimate prize. Looking back, Bardem is pragmatically philosophical. “I’ve said that it was nine months of tension,” Bardem says laughingly in a Beverly Hills hotel room. “I mean it was pleasurable, and I feel truly thankful and honored, really thankful and grateful for the recognition, but I guess when you come to the Oscar night, you come with a lot of things on your back,” the actor recalls. “It was a month of tension - of promoting - of being eight of nine months out of your home, speaking a foreign language, being in No Man’s Land, in the sense of, ‘Where am I?’. So you are like out in space and then everything comes to that very night and when it happens, you feel like a lot of things come to an end. That’s why people get so emotional and that’s why the value of the statue itself is so big, because it represents a lot of things,” he exclaims, sighing deeply. “Six months later you have that golden bald man there, you look at it and what I feel is like, thankful, grateful and lucky that I truly won the lottery, that it was my name and not another actor’s name that was in that envelope because it can’t measure any kind of talent, because the talent of all of those actors there is un-measurable. But I won the lottery,” he says smilingly.
… Read the full story »
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February 22, 2008
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For Javier Bardem, mother knows best |
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Pilar Bardem left an abusive husband, raised three kids to be successful adults and established herself as a top actress in Spain. Her next duty: rushing to the Oscar ceremony to support Javier.
When Javier Bardem was a toddler, his mother, Pilar, dragged him by the hand to the backstage doors of Spanish theaters as she searched for work. She was a young actress, trying to separate from an abusive husband at a time in Spanish history when women separated from their husbands only at death. Javier was 2.
That’s how the young Bardem came to know the world of performance art, Pilar says, adding that he scored his first role at age 5 when a production had a last-minute need for a child.
… Read the full story »
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February 18, 2008
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Reuters Interview |
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Just a minute with actor Javier Bardem
Spanish actor Javier Bardem has seen his star rise to lofty levels in recent years in Hollywood, and this year he is nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar, which will be given out on February 24.
Many Oscar watchers believe Bardem, 38, is a shoo-in to win for his role as a cold-blooded killer in bleak crime drama “No Country for Old Men,” which was directed by brothers Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, who are also up for the best director Oscar.
Bardem was previously Oscar nominated for best lead actor playing a Cuban poet in 2000’s “Before Night Falls,” directed by Julian Schnabel, who also is nominated for the best director Oscar this year with “The Diving Bell and The Butterfly.”
Q: So, who are better directors, the Coens or Julian Schnabel?
… Read the full story »
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February 15, 2008
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Oscars: Year of the bad boys? |
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Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem are odds-on favorites to win Academy Awards for playing bad guys without a backstory in ”There Will Be Blood” and ”No Country for Old Men” — and ringing in a new era of movie villainy
”The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted,” D.H. Lawrence once declared. He shoulda been a movie critic.
Mr. Lady Chatterley’s Lover was writing in the 1920s, but let’s face it, he might have just emerged fresh from a visit to today’s multiplex, his fingers still buttery from a double feature of No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood. And he might have been left shaken, as so many of us have, after encountering two of the hardest, most morally isolated and stoic killer-dillers in contemporary movies — Javier Bardem’s implacable, Beatle-cut annihilator Anton Chigurh and Daniel Day-Lewis’ misanthropic oilman/bowling aficionado Daniel Plainview.
At the conclusion of this year’s Oscars, Day-Lewis may well take home the award for Best Actor, and Bardem a matching statuette for Best Supporting Actor. By any measure, it was an awfully good year for awfully-behaved characters. Whether we’re talking about Johnny Depp’s demon barber in Sweeney Todd, the up-by-his-bootstraps hoodlum Denzel Washington portrayed in American Gangster, Russell Crowe’s sketch-pad-wielding Western baddie in 3:10 to Yuma, or the serial killer in David Fincher’s Zodiac, evil is artful in some of the best recent American movies.
… Read the full story »
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