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Javier has been busy lately, taking a break from his “break” to promote “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” which is being released in the US on August 15, 2008. Here is a mass upload of pictures from premieres and the press conference. He looks great and I believe all the guys will agree is the luckiest man alive standing next to Penelope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson!
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.
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.
An interesting development at today’s press junket for Woody Allen’s romantic comedy “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” when ComingSoon.net spoke to the film’s star Javier Bardem and asked him about Joe Carnahan’s “Killing Pablo”, for which the Oscar-winning actor was attached to play the title role of drug kingpin Pablo Escobar.
It was reported by Variety last October that the Yari Film Group was fast-tracking the film with Bardem playing the lead role and Christian Bale to co-star. When ComingSoon.net spoke to Carnahan earlier this summer, he was already talking about his trip down to Colombia to start preparing in order to shoot the movie in the fall. (At the time, he said nothing about the casting.)
In February, the National Ledger cast some doubt on whether Bardem would play the role, but it seemed more like Bardem hadn’t decided what he wanted to do yet, saying “Those credits are up in the air” even though Bardem was still listed to play the role on IMDb.com, having presumably been Carnahan’s first choice for Escobar.
With that in mind, ComingSoon.net asked Bardem today how he was preparing for the role, to which we were informed that it was “a mistake” and that it “wasn’t true” he was going to play the part in Carnahan’s movie. Since we presumed everything was in place for casting with the Variety report and Carnahan’s own progress on moving into production, we’ll have to wait and see who Carnahan gets to fill the role if Bardem is out. There’s been no word from Bale on his own part in the movie despite having spent the past few weeks doing press for “The Dark Knight.”
Javier Bardem has won Spain’s 2008 national film award, an honor given annually by the Culture Ministry.
Bardem was selected for the $46,500 prize for “goals achieved throughout a long career.”
The ministry, in a statement Wednesday, highlighted the 39-year-old actor’s “defense of the acting profession and a constant commitment to Spanish cinema.”
Bardem won a best supporting actor Oscar for “No Country for Old Men.” His screen credits also include “Before Night Falls.”
After more than thirty years stranded in one of the most inhospitable areas of desert on earth, refugees from Western Sahara are using the arts to highlight their plight. Peter Culshaw met Manu Chao and Javier Bardem at the Sahara Film Festival
How do you get attention for your cause if you are a marginalised people, ignored for thirty years in the desert? When I spoke to several Saharawi refugees in a camp this month in Southern Algeria they felt they had two options. One: violence - freedom fighting, from their point of view; terrorism, according to their enemies - or two: hosting an arts festival and getting some celebrities along to garner some media attention.
‘If me being here helps in any way, I am glad to help’ - Javier Bardem with Manu Chao and Javier Carcuera, director of the Sahara Film Festival
Unfortunately Javier Bardem is not present at the Cannes Film Festival to promote “Vicky Cristina Barcelona.” I would guess this is because of the reported exhaustion, he probably wants to take time off from the spotlight, which I respect. We now know that Javier’s character is called Juan Antonio. You can view a video clip of the movie here.
Variety offers some quotes of the film and Javier’s performance:
“Vicky Cristina Barcelona” is a sexy, funny divertissement that passes as enjoyably as an idle summer’s afternoon in the titular Spanish city. With Javier Barden starring as a bohemian artist involved variously with Scarlett Johansson, Penelope Cruz and Rebecca Hall, pic offers potent romantic fantasy elements for men and women and a cast that should produce the best commercial returns for a Woody Allen film since “Match Point.”
Even if the film provides a strictly tourist’s view of the city (a perspective justified by the scenario, in fact), and one just as upscale and heedless of money as ever for Allen, “VCB” is by several degrees more hot-blooded than his usual norm, thanks especially due to the palpable chemistry of Bardem and Cruz in the second half.
Looking macho but speaking mostly in a tender, sincere way to his women, Bardem is a thoroughly convincing and likable ladies’ man.
Check out the new trailer for “Vicky Cristina Barcelona” under the cut - non-US visitors can view it at YouTube. I’ve added the caps as well as some stills and on set pics of the movie. It will premiere at Cannes this weekend.
