Javier Bardem has provided dozens of memorable roles over the years, including some truly great villains. He used a cattle gun to horrific effect as the chilling hitman at the heart of No Country for Old Men and tormented Daniel Craig in the James Bond movie Skyfall.
But he may well have just delivered his most horrifying and dark performance ever in the Netflix limited series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story. Bardem portrays José Menéndez who, along with his wife, was killed in 1989 by his own sons. At their trial, the brothers claimed they committed the murders in response to years of violence and sexual abuse at the hands of José.
Ryan Murphy‘s series will delve into the darkness within the Menendez household that led to the murders, as well as the trial that saw the brothers locked up for their parricide. It’s set to be a bleak and intense story, with Bardem as one of its darkest elements.
Bardem, of course, is capable of being a truly chilling screen presence, but he has played surprisingly few out-and-out bad guys on the big screen. In fact, in a 2017 interview with USA Today, Bardem said he had only portrayed “three pure villains”. He added: “They all had layered characters and [were] very interesting people to follow. Being the villain is a very important key in those stories. That’s why people remember those characters.”
His first villain still stands as his most memorable. As the coin-flipping, cattle gun-toting Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brothers’ strange crime odyssey No Country for Old Men, Bardem is terrific. It was by far his most high-profile project in the English language at that point and, in a 2022 career retrospective with Vanity Fair, he confessed that he felt like a fish out of water.
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“He speaks English. He loves violence. He is violence. And he drives. I don’t do any of those things. I can’t do it,” Bardem said he told the Coens, who explained “that’s why we want you to do it”. Bardem said he felt “insecure” on the set.
Speaking to USA Today, he described Chigurh as “the least human” of his villains. He added: “There’s nothing to him more than being that horrible fate in people’s lives.”
Perhaps driven by that darkness, Bardem’s next two villains were over-the-top and carnivalesque in mainstream blockbusters. As Raoul Silva in Skyfall, he’s a strangely sexually-charged peacock of a bad guy driven by his personal hatred for James Bond’s spymaster boss M (Judi Dench). In a film that reckoned with the legacy of Bond as the franchise celebrated its 50th birthday, Silva wasn’t always the focus. But when he was on screen, Bardem attacked the role with joyous relish — the sort of joy that was a long way from Chigurh.
Read more: Javier Bardem has been forgiven by Judi Dench for Bond death (BANG Showbiz)
The same sense of silliness came across in Captain Salazar — the ghostly pirate hunter who sought to take vengeance against Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales. It would be fair to say that the film — known as Salazar’s Revenge here in the UK — isn’t a particularly stellar entry in the Pirates franchise, but Bardem does the best he can.
“He’s more a wicked character.in a sense that he’s more destroyed. He has more pain,” Bardem told USA Today. “I would feel like hugging him. I won’t hug Anton Chigurh.”
Bardem has flirted with on-screen villainy since, playing Pablo Escobar in the 2017 movie Loving Pablo and a manipulative factory owner in Spanish comedy The Good Boss. But there’s no doubt that Monsters has him back on the level of pure evil, almost 20 years after the Coens cemented him as one of the great big screen baddies.
Read more: The true story behind Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (Yahoo Entertainment)
It was Monsters creator Ryan Murphy who attracted Bardem to the role, with the actor thrilled to work with Murphy again after starring in his 2010 movie Eat Pray Love. Bardem told The Wrap that he was sure Murphy would “take very good care” of the difficult source material.
“It really speaks about some very important trauma, about how not being able to heal the traumatic events [from] childhood can cause dramatic effect for generations to come,” said Bardem. “I guess you just go in and just play it, play it safe. I believe in that. I have a family that I go to at the end of the day, and I don’t want to show up being somebody that is not daddy or the husband or the partner. It’s a job. And the more I allow myself to play with imagination, the farther I can go, I think.”
Bardem’s on-screen villainy has come full circle. He made his name as a chilling example of pure malevolence in No Country for Old Men and he’s now playing a father with enough darkness to abuse his own children. It doesn’t get more evil than that.
Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is on Netflix now.
