The Untold Truth About Javier Bardem
The Untold Truth About Javier Bardem Thomas Niedermueller/Getty Images
By Douglas Laman/April 16, 2021 8:29 pm EDT
Few modern actors have been able to convey the kind of range that Javier Bardem has. This performer, who hails from Spain, began his career in indie features before graduating to the world of Oscar-winning dramatic turns and James Bond baddies. In addition to forever changing how the world looks at coin tosses, Bardem has also cemented himself as an actor who always eschews the predictable in favor of exciting new territory. This trend looks likely to continue in the future. With upcoming projects that feature him playing roles as varied as Desi Arnaz,
Elaine Chung
In Michael Mann’s greatest movies, the good guys are never really all that different from the bad guys. And make no mistake, they are
always guys. The heroes and antiheroes of his stylishly macho films are put through their cat-and-mouse paces in a decidedly grey moral world, rather than a black-and-white one. There’s no room for concepts like right and wrong, they are all lonely nocturnal ambiguity—modern-day Ronin sagas cloaked in a cool shades of gun-metal slate. Just think of Robert De Niro and Al Pacino in 1995’s
Heat, where these two acting heavyweights play two equally obsessive sides of the same coin. Watching their famous diner tete-a-tete with the sound off, you’d never know who was the cop and who was the criminal.