On Javier Bardem’s sex appeal

Abstract

Film studies has interrogated the erotic appeal of male stars chiefly through attention to bodily display, addressing onscreen men's availability for or resistance to a theorized gaze. Yet cinematic sexiness depends not only on display of the body, but on a range of performance signs, narrative manoeuvres, industrial activities and viewer tastes. Focusing on contemporary Spanish star Javier Bardem, this article explores the manufacture and circulation of male sex symbols in global cinema. Bardem’s performances illuminate the ways male sex appeal functions as site of viewer interest, tonal feature of film texts, and exploitable asset in film financing and promotion. Addressing Bardem’s roles since 2004’s The Sea Inside, the article investigates sexy male stars’ commercial and aesthetic functions in global mainstream, middlebrow and art cinemas. In particular, it argues that sexual charisma underwrites Bardem’s presentation even in films that remove his characters from the sexual economy.

Keywords:

• stardom
• acting
• performance
• masculinity
• sex symbols
• Javier Bardem
• Spain

Let us say for the sake of argument that Javier Bardem is a very sexy man, even in his unconventional roles in the past decade as soulful quadriplegic, lustful clergyman and affectless assassin. Like physical beauty or artistic talent, sex appeal is a subjective category that defies objective measurement. Still, we can assess it with attention to features of screen texts such as performance and representation, as well as with consideration of surrounding cultural production and commentary. As I discuss in this article, profiles of Bardem in English-language entertainment and celebrity news almost invariably reference his sex appeal, even when his contemporaneous screen roles might appear grotesquely off-putting. In late 2007, for example, People Magazine included him in its annual rundown of ‘the sexiest men alive’ (‘The Hot List’ 2007) in an issue that hit newsstands just as No Country for Old Men (Coens, 2007), with Bardem as a cold-blooded killer having an extended bad hair day, began its wide US release. The film prompted a VH1.com headline, ‘Hot or Not? No Country for Old Men’s Anton Chigurh’, with readers responding in the affirmative to the informal poll (Collins 2007a, 2007b). In subsequent years, Bardem has appeared repeatedly on the covers of US and international editions of men’s magazines such as GQ and Esquire, attesting to his status as a global style icon and sex symbol. A rising star of Spanish cinema since the early 1990s and of globalized art cinema since his lead role in Before Night Falls (Schnabel, 2000), Bardem has received abundant attention in studies of Spanish film stardom and masculinity. He has been critically positioned in multiple contexts, including investigations of his acting ability and his physical appearance, his body in particular. I propose to use Bardem’s film career anew to develop a model of cinematic male sex appeal, measuring its economic and symbolic value and its contribution to star, filmmaker and film reputations in popular and art cinema cultures.

Film studies has interrogated the erotic appeal of male stars chiefly through attention to bodily display, addressing ways men in films are available for or resist the male gaze theorized as a facet of film spectatorship. Alongside the template of gaze theory, much academic work on stardom privileges textual constructions of gender identity, attuned to the myriad textual determinants of individual films as well as drawing comparisons across a performer’s filmography. However, textual studies of star performance often conceal powerful intertextual and industrial determinants contributing to the global circulation of stars. In the realm of sex appeal, actor and star sex appeal depends on exposure and display of the body, as well as on a range of performative signs that comprise his or her idiolect. In James Naremore’s formulation, the idiolect involves ‘a set of performing traits that is systematically highlighted in films’ (1988, 4), leading to audience recognition across a body of work. Films can further showcase or magnify sex appeal through technical, narrative and tonal manoeuvres. Additionally, generic markings, industrial activities and viewer taste preferences all factor into the manifestation and recognition of screen sexual charisma. The screen representation of Bardem’s complex sex appeal suggests some of the ways in which global popular and art cinemas manufacture and circulate adult male sex symbols in given historical contexts. Bardem’s recent roles and ongoing career illuminate the function of male sex appeal as site of viewer interest, as a linchpin for art and pop-art film narratives, as a tonal feature of expressively stylized cinema and as an exploitable asset in film financing, international circulation and promotion.

Sexy male stars are a key industrial and textual feature of critically acclaimed pop-art films, prestige dramas and mainstream uplift fare. Bardem has played roles in all these categories. Beyond his extensive filmography in Spanish cinema across the 1990s, his career ranges from showcase roles in auteurist-designated art dramas (Alejandro Amenábar’s The Sea Inside [2004], Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful [2010] and Terrence Malick’s To the Wonder [2012]), to genre films from critically celebrated US directors (the Coen brothers’ No Country for Old Men and Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona [2008]), to middlebrow pageants (such as Love in the Time of Cholera [Newell, 2007] and Goya’s Ghosts [Forman, 2006]) and even pop-lit-derived ‘chick flicks’ (Eat Pray Love [Murphy, 2010]). A strand of his career in the 2000s locates him in supporting roles in prestige Hollywood thrillers designed for international release, beginning with Collateral (Mann, 2004) and continuing with Skyfall (Mendes, 2012) and The Counselor (Scott, 2013). Bardem as global icon joins a long list of ethnically figured male stars, descendants in US film culture of iconic ‘Latin lover’ Rudolph Valentino. Like many ethnically marked actors, Bardem has embodied men of multiple Latin and Hispanic origins. Particularly in Spanish cinema, he has played dozens of roles as explicitly or implicitly Spanish characters. US-set films have routinely cast him as Mexican, as in Perdita Durango (de la Iglesia, 1997) and associatively via the Texas/Mexico border setting of No Country for Old Men. The Great Plains setting of To the Wonder would suggest a Mexican origin for Bardem’s Father Quintana character, although his Spanish-language voice-over does not include a Mexican accent. Other transnational films have defined him as Cuban (Before Night Falls), Brazilian (Eat Pray Love) and unspecified Latin American (in the unnamed setting of The Dancer Upstairs [Malkovich, 2002]). Noting his casting in a range of Hispanic or generically ethnic identities, Miguel Fernández Labayen and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega argue that Bardem ‘partakes in the dynamic of shameless, transcultural ventriloquism that Hollywood favors when integrating foreign talent in its modus operandi’ (2013, 177; original emphasis). At the same time, his performances and the films in which he appears provide a breadth of cases through which to develop and test hypotheses of transnational male sex appeal in contemporary cinema.

English-language press and fan discourses recurrently attest to Bardem’s sex appeal, and films regularly present this appeal as a given in narrative terms, requiring little or no explanation. Academic work on Spanish film stars includes numerous appraisals of Bardem’s stardom and sex appeal. I can hardly disagree that reading Bardem’s body and performance is a source of intellectual and other satisfactions. Like the hypothesized viewer in Chris Perriam’s monograph on Spanish male stars, I rely on performers such as Bardem ‘for ratifications of male experience, for psychic and social feedback, [and] for pointers to more efficacious romantic and sexual performances’ (2003, 13). Beyond this epistemological function of a star’s screen appearances, male sex appeal serves commercial functions in global mainstream, middlebrow and art cinemas. Art cinema reception, for example, can code male sex appeal in terms of charisma and presence, fostering the reputations of figures such as Bardem as serious actors also capable of delivering aesthetic satisfactions. As I suggest in the following analysis, in commercial mainstream and prestige middlebrow films, the combination of acting talent and sexual charisma can create appeals to diverse viewerships. Similarly, the presence of sexually charismatic male stars in ostensible art films helps leaven such films’ narrative complexity, formal stylization and other possible impediments to viewer comprehension and pleasure. I will point presently to examples from Bardem’s US films and transnational co-productions beginning with 2004’s Collateral and The Sea Inside that take various steps to magnify as well as undermine his sexual appeal and performative charisma.

Getting to know Javier Bardem

Beginning in the late 1990s, scholars of Spanish cinema have approached Bardem as a Spanish star but also as a figure who circumvents or exceeds dominant constructions of Spanish national and gender identity. Looking at Bardem’s 1990s films and some works from the 2000s, Perriam and Fouz-Hernández both identify the actor’s initial ‘Iberian macho’ image and the more complex image that replaces it after the 1990s. In Perriam’s survey, commentaries on Bardem regard the actor ‘as epitomizing not only a general set of Spanish masculinities but a geographically non-defined machismo’ (2003, 93). Still, even in advance of his role in The Sea Inside as a disabled middle-aged man, Fouz-Hernández notes that Bardem moves beyond ‘his much hated “macho ibérico” typecasting’ with ‘a series of minor and major roles involving physical disability, older age, fluctuating body weight, and sexual or political dissidence’ (2005, 191). Even amid the 1990s work in Spanish cinema that earned him his macho screen image, he occasionally plays gay characters, in his credited film debut in The Ages of Lulu (Luna, 1990) and in Second Skin (Vera, 1999). He also has homoerotic exchanges in Boca a boca/Mouth to Mouth (Pereira, 1995), Éxtasis (Barroso, 1996) and Entre las piernas/Between Your Legs (Pereira, 1999). Of these films, though, only Boca a boca received a substantial international release. Most of the films in which Bardem initially broadened his image are not domestic Spanish productions but co-productions. He plays a wheelchair-bound ex-policeman in Live Flesh (Almodóvar, 1997), made with French co-financing, and the most internationally noted of his gay roles in 2000’s Before Night Falls, US-financed and shot in Mexico. Because his initial, macho image took shape in Spanish productions that received only limited international distribution, most viewers outside Spanish cinema’s orbit of influence encounter Bardem only in the second, revised iteration of his star persona. Lacking resources to read Bardem’s mature roles through the prism of his earlier, macho-inflected performances, these viewers must respond to a narrower set of textual cues (as well as more limited extratextual discourses given Bardem’s modest presence in English-language entertainment news and commentary compared to coverage of him in Spain). Still, Bardem’s performances, supported by formal and narrative devices and some press discourse, encourage reception around categories of eroticism that help distinguish particular niche appeals for his films in international circulation.

Outside Spain, and especially in the US, commentaries on Bardem’s film work consistently focus on two things: first, the breadth and depth of his acting ability; and second or equally, his sex appeal, attributed to his good looks and sometimes charisma or presence, arguably performative features that implicitly refer back to his acting skill. Profiles of Bardem still routinely reference his past roles in Spanish and transnational films, suggesting most filmgoers’ unfamiliarity with his work. For example, reporting on a 2003 Manhattan photo shoot for Bardem, the New York Times’s Horacio Silva (2003, B38) observes that ‘none of the onlookers have a clue who he is’. The accompanying article includes the signposts offered to readers at this stage in Bardem’s career: popular in Spain thanks to Jamón, Jamón (Luna, 1992), visible in the US following distribution of the Pedro Almodóvar-directed Live Flesh, and best known for the US independent, and mostly English-language production, Before Night Falls. Over time, Bardem’s domestic stardom registers mostly as a footnote in US profiles of the actor, and such coverage references his Jamón, Jamón role less frequently as he developed a body of work in prestige co-productions. Relatedly, attention to work with anointed auteur directors such as Almodóvar and Woody Allen partly detaches Bardem from national contexts in favour of the shifting locations of global art cinema. Accolades about his acting from filmmakers and fellow actors outside Spain further this process of relocation. Before Night Falls director Julian Schnabel claimed that actors Al Pacino, Robert Duvall and Morgan Freeman all said of Bardem, ‘Where did you find this guy?’ (Rodriguez 2000); in 2001, Dennis Hopper praised his Before Night Falls performance and John Malkovich called him ‘the best actor in Europe’ (Hohenadel 2001, MT4). Elsewhere, Malkovich claimed, ‘To me, Javier is a direct descendant of the Mastroiannis and the Brandos’ (Rodriguez 2000), positioning Bardem among respected actors associated with strong national institutions and industries but equally known as major figures and long-time sex symbols of European and international cinemas.

Meanwhile, the persistent attention to Bardem’s sex appeal, counterposed with both his own self-deprecating remarks and his observations about his film characters’ sex lives, keeps eroticism among the dominant concerns of journalistic analyses of his method and output.¹ A male New York Times fashion writer describes Bardem as ‘a restaurateur, a former rugby player, and let’s face it, quite a looker’ (Bryan 2003); the first two qualities serve as guarantors of masculine authenticity, legitimating commentary on his visual appeal. In a later New York Times fashion profile titled ‘Portrait of a Lady Killer’, Bardem discusses his approach to No Country for Old Men’s murderous Anton Chigurh by saying, ‘I thought of him as a man who never had sex. […] I even imagined how Chigurh would masturbate. […] [I]t was important to think about how he relates to other people, even sexually. So I think he will masturbate once per month in the dark and with a pillow. Very clean’ (Hirschberg 2008, 182). Comparatively, while he terms his character in Vicky Cristina Barcelona as ‘very sexual’, he notes with regard to his co-stars Penélope Cruz, Scarlett Johansson and Rebecca Hall that ‘I’m with these three beauties. I was afraid no one in the audience would believe they’d ever be with me. I was in the makeup trailer saying, “You’d better work a miracle”’ (ibid.). Interviewing him on US television on the eve of Skyfall’s release, Conan O’Brien said of Bardem’s first scene in the film, ‘It really does seem like you are coming on to James Bond in a very sexually aggressive way’, a reading Bardem affirms by comically caressing the host’s leg and then hand, to O’Brien’s delight.² In each of these cases, interviewers find Bardem’s physical appearance and apparent sexual magnetism so noteworthy that they demand acknowledgement, and sometimes exaggeration or parody. Spanish political issues, international human rights, the nature of artistic production and other topics have also appeared across profiles of Bardem since 2000, but none are as prominent as the subject of his sex appeal. ‘I love sex with women’, he volunteered to an interviewer (Silva 2003, B38) in an early promotion for The Dancer Upstairs, which merges art cinema, political thriller and erotic drama modes and genres. Both textually and extratextually, then, sexual charisma provides an exploitable element of Bardem’s films and a key aspect of his star persona.

Acting sexy (but not always sexual)

Interviewers respond not only to Bardem’s offscreen presence but also to his film performances, many of which foreground, or encourage reception in terms of, sexual and erotic appeal. In the past decade in particular, films have distinctively configured Bardem’s characters in terms of off-axis sex appeal: the wounded sexuality of disabled or diseased characters, the mature or even decrepit sexuality of ageing and elderly characters, and what we might term the unsexy sexiness of killers, torturers and other figures presented as something other than straightforwardly appealing romantic or sexual prospects. In a series of films, Bardem portrays overwhelmingly unsexy figures who become erotically appealing through his performances and through formal choices that aid or complicate the signification of these performances. Sexual charisma underwrites Bardem’s presentation not only in works such as Eat Pray Love and Vicky Cristina Barcelona that activate fantasies of seductive ethnic Others, but also in films that principally remove his characters from the sexual economy. In narrative terms, characters such as the single father and prostate cancer victim of Biutiful and the itinerant assassin of No Country for Old Men are not explicitly sexual beings. Even the Spanish inquisitor of Goya’s Ghosts, defined ineradicably for viewers by a first-act rape, operates mostly at the level of public morality and politics rather than through tropes of eroticism. In these films, though, aesthetic supplements such as sculpted lighting and extensive close-up photography extract the elements of Bardem’s performances that can be read as erotic. Across these works, sex appeal emerges as a key performance attribute magnified through formal devices of camerawork, lighting and sound.

Bardem’s work in the past decade presents him with different acting opportunities, sometimes serving up glamorous side roles, other times posing dramatic challenges that would expose any performer’s shortcomings. He first appears in a mainstream Hollywood film in the Michael Mann-directed Collateral, nominally a two-hander between actors Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx but with a large supporting cast to raise the stakes of their professional conflict. Midway into the Los Angeles-set film, cabbie Max (Foxx) must enter a Latin nightclub to retrieve a list of names from crime kingpin Felix (Bardem). Bardem appears in a single scene of about six minutes, never moving from his seat in a secluded back booth in the venue. Max navigates heavy security to reach Felix, and armed bodyguards surround the pair during their conversation. The seated Felix, dressed in a casual suit and with close-cropped hair and beard, appears only in medium shots and close-ups. The scene’s pretext restricts Bardem from using body language as an expressive tool, but shot selections and sound give prominence to his facial expressions and line readings. Periodic push-ins as Felix talks to Max and limited accompanying sound further showcase Bardem’s expressions and speech, which form a substantive component of his idiolect in non-Spanish films. His character’s power firmly established, Bardem plays Felix as a deliberate figure who speaks slowly and betrays little emotion, but also as a raconteur, ready with a threatening parable about Santa Claus’s helper Black Peter. Unbalanced compositions initially show Bardem alone at the right edge of the frame, cutting off the view of Foxx but leaving Bardem doubled in a mirror next to him. The two eventually share the frame, with Max working to impersonate professional hitman Vincent (Cruise). With its elaborate setup and presentation of Felix, the showcase scene tells viewers that Bardem’s character serves as the yardstick of cold but intimate professionalism, and his dialogue with Max represents a test for the nervous cabbie. The scene also constitutes Bardem’s introduction to global popular cinema but is a platform for, rather than a test of, his acting skill. Acclaimed already for Spanish cinema and art-film roles, and perhaps noticed in cult fare such as Perdita Durango, he appears in Collateral as an already reputable, fully formed, mature figure whose charisma and gravitas are not in question, even in his brief appearance.

Bardem’s next film, The Sea Inside, affords him considerably more screen time than Collateral but restricts his movements even further. A possible limit case in his career, The Sea Inside hints at the dynamic interplay between sexiness and unsexiness that defines Bardem’s work across the 2000s. In the fictionalized version of a historical case, he plays Ramón Sampedro, a quadriplegic accident victim who campaigns for the right to die. The film begins with fragmented shots of a man (whose face does not appear) walking on the beach, then shows viewers present-day Sampedro, doughy, bald and bedridden. Bardem plays the character with a weary, contained physicality – he says of his performance that ‘[m]y intention was to show a body that had been immobile for a long time’ (Pliagas 2005) – and the film’s many close-ups divert attention from Sampedro’s frail body to Bardem’s expressive eyes. At the same time, as part of its emphasis on Sampedro’s psychological conflict, the film repeatedly returns to the scene of his accident: a picturesque beach where Bardem appears in his young, healthy state. He first recognizably appears in a warmly sunlit profile shot that contrasts markedly with the pale blues and drab greys that dominate the present-tense narrative’s mostly indoor scenes. The film’s US release poster uses a variation on this close-up of the healthy Bardem, a highly deceptive strategy given how fleetingly this version of the character appears, but one that emphasizes the healthy Bardem’s commercial if not narrative weight. Poignantly, but also shrewdly, the flashbacks mostly show a long-haired Bardem struggling or limp underwater. Both poster and film exploit Bardem’s unobscured physical appeal.³ The repeated flashbacks grant viewers access to Sampedro’s subjectivity, recalling his past attractiveness to underscore the present-tense sensation of extreme loss. While the desire for death rather than sex drives the film’s storyline, the initial interior flashback of Sampedro’s accident is intercut with still photos of his undamaged character, many showing him at leisure with different women. The sequence thus invokes the loss of romantic connections as well as physical and sexual vigour. The multiple returns to the scene of Sampedro’s accident serve essential narrative and thematic functions, emphasizing the story’s defining incident and explaining the source of Bardem’s sad gaze. This device also juxtaposes Bardem’s controlled performance as the disabled Sampedro with his brief but evocative turn as his younger, healthier self. Most obviously, the flashbacks give viewers opportunities to see Bardem in a bathing suit, and shots of sun and shadow contouring his body aestheticize the moment even while showing him unconscious underwater.

Figure 1. Make-up and restricted body language contribute to Bardem’s portrayal of middle-aged quadriplegic Ramón Sampedro in The Sea Inside. Fine Line Features, 2004.

Bardem’s subsequent roles further allow him to play characters that exist in realms of sexual feeling even if their activities do not invite viewers into conventional sexual or romantic scenarios. Goya’s Ghosts presents him as Brother Lorenzo, a priest of the Spanish Inquisition who imprisons a merchant’s daughter, Inés (Natalie Portman), whom he is moved to ravage in her sepia-lit cell. Lorenzo later reinvents himself as a Napoleonic prosecutor and a benefactor to the now-insane Inés and her own prostitute daughter. He finally dies drooling in a public execution. The Milos Forman-directed film operates in the mode of historical drama and sweeping political critique, but it delivers its ideas through sensualized events and imagery. Goya’s Ghosts puts Bardem in loose-fitting, fabric-intensive period costumes, reserving bodily display for Portman’s Inés and for other female characters (Portman also plays Inés’s daughter, Alicia). Still, warm lighting and earthy colours strongly aestheticize the milieu and allow Bardem to appear again as a figure defined and undone by cerebral and carnal passions.⁴

Love in the Time of Cholera continues in the mode of the historical film, also spanning decades in the life of Bardem’s character, Florentino Ariza, and foregrounding his misadventures of passion. As with The Sea Inside, Bardem first appears in makeup as an elderly man, although made appealing visually with warm lighting and transitively via the presence of an attractive, naked woman in bed beside him when he first appears. The elderly character of the frame story eventually gives way to the less-transformed Bardem (made up to look moderately younger rather than much older) playing Florentino as a younger adult. Earlier, Unax Ugalde plays a teen Florentino, handsome if hardly resembling Bardem. Thus, again, another performer transitively offers evidence of Bardem’s character’s sex appeal, underwriting his adult allure by presenting him as a beautiful young man. The film shows some of the hundreds of sexual encounters the story attributes to Florentino, mostly presenting him partly clothed but sometimes displaying his naked body, if in discreet, genital-obscuring views. Formally, the film is a close cousin of Goya’s Ghosts, not so grotesque in its depiction of the historical world and with much more greenery and floral imagery, but still favouring warm, sepia-toned lighting, artfully sculpted shadows and a palette of reds and caramel skin and earth tones. As with the later Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Love in the Time of Cholera’s visual field facilitates Bardem’s embodiment of exaggerated but tasteful sensuality.

No Country for Old Men represents Bardem’s first role not explicitly tied to a Hispanic or Latino identity, although he again plays a character defined by powerful internal passions. The cold-hearted assassin Chigurh appears an outwardly sexless figure, his monthly masturbation sessions (per Bardem’s imagining of the character) occurring offscreen. Yet his engagements with other characters are expressly intimate. He kills with a pneumatic gun pressed to the temple or spares lives but chills those he meets with cryptic, aphoristic banter. After an initial spasm of intimate violence in which he strangles a policeman, Chigurh’s motions and speech are slow and deliberate. Bardem speaks calmly and moves with economy, his 2000s mode of languorous performance overlaying a latent physicality. Chigurh’s threatening carriage and creepily insinuating dialogue make all his encounters with others episodes of violation. In another film that restricts his bodily display, Bardem uses expressive line readings and mannered body language to establish physical presence. Camerawork and storytelling support this project. For example, while Chigurh escapes physical harm for nearly the entire film, just before the end a car accident leaves him bloodied and with a bone protruding from his arm. As he sits on a suburban curb, two boys assist him in making a sling, with one contributing his shirt to the effort at Chigurh’s urging. Though not explicitly sexual, this penultimate scene occurs in the realm of the physical and emphasizes violation (Chigurh’s) and vulnerability (both Chigurh’s and the shirtless boy’s). In the film’s final view of him, the black-clad Bardem hobbles away from the camera, his own intimate wounding punctuating his exit from the incongruously sunny, calm world he occupies. The long shot and rear view of Bardem finally diminish his intensity, freeing viewers and other characters from close engagement with the figure who has commanded space and attention across the film.

Figure 2. No Country for Old Men shows Bardem undressed (and again framed in a mirror) as his Anton Chigurgh character tends to his wounds. Miramax Films/Paramount Vantage, 2007.

Bardem’s Best Supporting Actor Academy Award for No Country for Old Men cements his reputation as a serious actor in US films, opportune timing given his next two roles as more or less conventional hunks. In both Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Eat Pray Love, Bardem’s characters are the prizes for female tourists on voyages of self-discovery. Reviewers praised him for imparting apparent ease and grace to what could otherwise be disastrously clichéd characters. For the former, the New York Times’s Manohla Dargis termed Bardem ‘one of Spain’s national treasures’ (2008, E1) and finds that he ‘invests the cliché of the Latin lover with so much humor and feeling that he quickly vanquishes the stereotype’ (E8). Additionally, whatever miracles have occurred in the makeup trailer, the film’s lighting design lends Bardem a romantic warmth even for serious scenes, such as one in which he and co-star Penélope Cruz gesticulate wildly and argue in unsubtitled Spanish on a Barcelona side street. Cinematography and art direction help romanticize the film’s scenes of sexual activity, as does the discreet treatment of bodies (giving it a PG-13 rating in the US). The film shows no nudity, presenting only the opening moments of many sex scenes. Eat Pray Love also uses Bardem as the object of female romantic, and with another PG-13 rating only discreetly sexual, fantasy. After leaving the inadequate Billy Crudup, James Franco and Richard Jenkins in her wake, Julia Roberts’ divorcée character travels to Bali in the film’s third act, where she at last finds a suitable mate in Bardem’s expatriated, and also divorced, Brazilian entrepreneur. As part of Bardem’s résumé of nearly 50 films, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and Eat Pray Love are especially notable in not using him (or other male actors, aside from one scene in Eat Pray Love involving a studly Australian) as a site of visual pleasure for his naked body. Their mode of sexual display seems borrowed from classical Hollywood, perhaps the baseline mode for contemporary woman-centred popular cinema.

Indeed, Bardem’s roles in the 2000s involve less explicit physical display than most of his 1990s work, including markedly fewer (if any) full-body nude shots or rear-end shots. Partly this change results from Bardem’s move from the somewhat racy environs of Spanish popular and independent cinema in the 1990s to the past decade’s more upscale but tamer realms of transnational co-productions, particularly those configured as prestige, art or otherwise serious films. He is also ageing, turning 40 a few months before Eat Pray Love’s shooting began. Bardem has repeatedly rehearsed his own ageing onscreen, playing older characters in Mondays in the Sun (León de Aranoa, 2002), The Sea Inside and Love in the Time of Cholera. Quoting him in 2007, People magazine spins his increasing age as a facet of, rather than a detriment to, his sex appeal: ‘Bardem does acknowledge that he has a certain seductive intensity. “Once you start to get older, you have to focus and be passionate about life day after day”’ (‘The Hot List’ 2007). Psychology and emotion supplant naked-body display as key features of Bardem’s star image and accompany its internationalization. If the naked body of the ‘macho ibérico’ defined Bardem as a figure of regional interest, the recognition of on- and offscreen passion and intensity contributes to his later global stardom.

Bardem’s move beyond Spanish cinema also makes accented speech newly significant to his on- and offscreen persona. Across his 2000s films, Bardem performs sensuality chiefly through facial expressions – the numerous references in reviews to his ‘heavy brow’ attest to this emphasis – through languid, controlled body language and gestures and through carefully enunciated, discernibly accented English. English-speaking viewers may not recognize the variances in accents among Bardem’s characters, but he nonetheless offers a distinctive mode of speech, a soothing baritone voice that usually betrays no stress or discomfort. Reflecting on his English-language role in Before Night Falls as Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, Bardem comments, ‘In Spain I have my background, my language, but […] in English with a foreign crew playing a foreign character – I don’t have any tricks’ (Hohenadal 2001, MT4). Even this disclaimer hints at Bardem’s attention to vocal performance, which becomes one of the key attributes distinguishing him in English-language films. Voice has also distinguished Bardem’s English acting from that in Spanish. He speaks much more slowly in English-language films than in Spanish works such as Jamón, Jamón and Boca a boca, in many scenes of which he speaks in rapid-fire, almost screwball cadences. While this speech served his youthfully virile Spanish characters, his slower delivery in English-language films helps construct him as a man of wisdom and romance, rendering sex appeal in auditory as much as visual terms.

Biutiful and beyond

In 2010, after a six-year absence, Bardem returned to Spanish-language production for Biutiful, a substantial departure from his two previous carefree-dreamboat roles but consistent with the larger trajectory of performances we might term unsexy, or even post-sexy. Biutiful is one of many films in which Bardem plays a sexy or formerly sexy man compromised by disease, disability or objectionable behaviour. Biutiful’s aesthetic mode is magic miserablism, with Bardem as Uxbal, a greying single parent of two young children. Uxbal copes with the emotional demands of a needy and unbalanced ex-wife, a criminal enterprise job involving exploitation of immigrant labour, occasional supernatural side work channelling the sentiments of the recently deceased, and his own terminal cancer. Narrating Uxbal’s multiple hospital visits and episodes of acute physical discomfort, the film depicts him as in no condition for sexual activity. His oversexed ex-wife propositions him nonetheless, although he does not succumb to her degraded charms. While the film visualizes Uxbal’s slow physical breakdown, it also markedly aestheticizes Bardem in surrounding scenes, granting him many intimate close-ups and periodically framing him in coronas of sunlight. The film also bookends its downbeat central narrative with a fantasy scene of Uxbal in conversation with a young version of his father, with Bardem appearing at ease in a snowy forest. Alternately embodying abjection and hopefulness, Bardem again gives a restrained performance, using slow, limited movements to inscribe the sensations of despair and fatigue onto his body. Even as Biutiful withholds visual evidence of Uxbal’s happiness or sexual pleasure, it presents Bardem as a physically charismatic figure at his core. Bardem does more than focalize romantic fantasies for female and male viewers. His physicality, expressiveness and other performance attributes supply credibility and granularity to films in numerous genres and modes. In Biutiful, Bardem’s moody, expressive performance suits the film’s multiple tones: grim social realism, masculinized sentimentality and Christian supernaturalism. Here, Bardem’s lead performance arguably brings coherence to textual features that otherwise may be received as incompatible.

Figure 3. In Biutiful, sculpted lighting attractively frames Bardem’s face as his character, Uxbal, undergoes medical treatment. Roadside Attractions, 2010.

While often described as a ‘chameleon’ for playing a wide range of character types with markedly different looks and comportment, late in 2012 Bardem appeared in two US films in chiefly English-language roles that display many consistencies with his past decade’s profile.⁵ He again played key supporting roles in films from acclaimed directors, this time the US’s long-reclusive Terrence Malick and the UK’s Sam Mendes (still best known for 1999’s American Beauty). Indeed, Bardem’s ‘good actor’ reputation outside Spanish cinema involves collaborations with many notable international directors, usually men whose work earns critical accolades if not consistent commercial success. The texture of his performances – dramatic, aesthetic, sensual and more – depends on relationships with sympathetic directors, whose jobs include not only directing actors but also guiding cinematographers and overseeing editing. This last activity is particularly notable for Bardem’s role in To the Wonder, for which director Malick cut entirely the scenes of many other actors (see Kiang 2013). In the released film, Bardem’s character, like those of the other principals, registers mostly in fragments. Although Bardem’s relationships with directors are not measurable onscreen, his choice of filmmaking collaborators remains significant to any assessment of his performances and their circulation and reception.

Bardem’s work in To the Wonder earned limited publicity, with the film playing at the Venice and Toronto festivals in September 2012 but then receiving only a patchwork international release across the first half of 2013. His supporting role as a spiritually troubled priest, Father Quintana, moves him away from figures defined by physicality or eroticism. Bardem commands attention in his limited screen time in the impressionistic work, if not in ways typically associated with gripping performance: he mopes around his house; ministers to a half-empty church or outdoors, to the ravaged, rural poor; and philosophizes in his Spanish-language voice-over. Most of his scenes show him walking aimlessly amid the decrepit homes of the Oklahoma town his character inhabits, his apparent directionlessness magnified by fluid but almost incessant camera movement, sweeping around and over him and catching him in fleeting side and top views. In scenes with other performers, Bardem mostly stands silently while characters speak to (or at) him; his face is a mask of patience and compassion but not understanding. His character experiences a crisis of faith that, like the film’s other narrative strands and emotions, receives little explanation. Bardem’s largely offscreen vocal performance adds to the film’s modest chorus of abstract sentiments, joining the French-language voice-over attributed to Olga Kurylenko’s transplanted, unmoored young mother. He has little dialogue and no sustained interactions with other characters, but his facial expressiveness – signalling psychological depths the film does not excavate – helps him to provide an emotional and thematic anchor for the elusive film. To the Wonder links Father Quintana to concerns and motifs of faith and light, darkness and death, but aside from showing him presiding over a wedding, the film does not bring him into the sexual economy; other performers, particularly female leads Kurylenko and Rachel McAdams, occupy that physical and expressive terrain. His role calls on him to convey signification mostly through subtle facial expressions although, as for other characters, the film asks him to be continually mobile, traversing yards and sidewalks. Repeatedly showing Bardem from behind as he walks down suburban streets in his black priest’s garb, many shots curiously recall the last image of his character in No Country for Old Men, which also presents him as an enigmatic figure pressed into intimate encounters with denizens of the suburban or small-town American West. Making Bardem the central, isolated figure of extended long shots allows him to perform through silent, naturalistic physicality, conveying weariness or defeat through a slumped-over carriage and by facing away from the camera. Recalling Bardem’s more libidinous characters in other films, we could identify this enervation as a symptom of post-sexiness, a condition that underwrites his priest character’s fleeting, asexual interactions with former model Kurylenko: two European sex symbols meet onscreen, and sparks emphatically do not fly.

To the Wonder attracted limited notice, but in mainstream Hollywood screen culture, Bardem enjoyed a high profile with another villainous turn, as the designated adversary of super-spy James Bond (Daniel Craig) in the franchise outing Skyfall. The Bond series has routinely cast as villains European male stars of transnational and art-house cinema – most recently Denmark’s Mads Mikkelsen and France’s Mathieu Amalric – capable of performances as sexual beings while also convincingly embodying diabolical evil. Seeing Bardem take on this familiar template need not diminish any sense of the distinctiveness of his characterizations. Instead, his casting further attests to the commercial and reputational value of sexually charismatic male performance. More than two years after playing a desiring (and desirable) suitor in Eat Pray Love, Bardem returns to an explicitly sexualized role in Skyfall. His character, Silva, an ex-spy now plotting murderous revenge on Bond’s supervisor M (Judi Dench), is far from romantic: he terrorizes and kills as callously as any villain in the long series. He does, however, bring to the fore the sublimated homoeroticism that underwrites many encounters between virile secret agent Bond and his gallery of male foes.

Bardem appears just after the film’s midpoint, having drawn Bond to a lair on a depopulated island. He literally makes an entrance, stepping out of an elevator and walking from the far end of a cavernous interior space to meet Bond, who has been tied to a chair. Flanked by rows of artfully arranged, stripped-down computer equipment and resplendent in a dandyish ensemble, Bardem’s self-assured character enjoys a runway promenade for his entrance. Skyfall’s presentation of Bardem walking in a wide camera shot strongly contrasts with To the Wonder’s scenes of his troubled, doubting character in motion. Craig appears from behind, facing Silva, for most of the two-minute shot, so Bardem’s walk and accompanying monologue is as much a performance for his onscreen adversary as for viewers. The scene permits Bardem to turn away from the naturalistic, representational performances that characterize much of his serious work in favour of ostentatious, presentational acting, motivated by his character’s desire for an audience for his criminal games.⁶ Once he joins Bond at the foreground of the frame, Silva questions Bond, in the scene noted in Conan O’Brien’s interview among other commentaries. Shifting mostly to a series of tight close-ups, the exchange turns from implicitly to explicitly homoerotic, as Bardem strokes Craig’s chest and neck and runs his hands along his thighs. Bardem plays the part with a range of effete finger and hand gestures, and also repeatedly purses and smacks his lips mischievously. Craig, mostly immobilized, responds with Bond’s self-assured, metrosexual masculinity. In riposte, and with an audible snort, Silva lampoons the pillars of Bond’s identity: ‘all that physical stuff – so dull, so dull’. While freed in part to play a connotatively gay arch-villain, Bardem must also fulfil the expository demands of a supporting cast member in a Hollywood thriller, his character goading Bond by reciting information from the agent’s classified file. Thus, as in his appearance in Collateral, here too he appears seated in many medium shots, typing away at a laptop fitted into a hard-shell briefcase.

In the Hollywood roles that more or less bookend this exploration of his past decade’s work, Bardem offers different inflections of the ethnically marked criminal, in both cases demonstrating personal magnetism that can register as authority, confidence and psychological or sexual menace. Like Collateral, Skyfall allows him a showcase scene in which another star is shepherded to him at gunpoint for a meeting in an isolated location. In Skyfall, Bardem achieves greater mobility, first in the long walk he takes across the warehouse interior while delivering a lengthy monologue, then in his lengthy pursuit of Bond across Britain for a final hand-to-hand showdown in remote Scotland. Amid this final confrontation, and before subjecting him to the ignominious death of most Bond villains, the film allows Bardem to mock one of the franchise’s sources of excitement when he wearily exclaims, ‘All this running and jumping; it’s exhausting’. Such lines hardly undermine the film’s project, instead further demonstrating Hollywood’s welcome embrace of an international talent. Indeed, the film returns the favour by playing on Bardem’s own good looks. In addition to adorning his character with outlandish hair, the film presents his desire for revenge as motivated by a disfiguring accident after swallowing a cyanide capsule, which does not kill him but destroys half of his face. During the interrogation of Silva after his capture by the British, Silva removes a prosthetic to show off his gruesome injuries. The film thus offers an inverted money shot of the distinctive Bardem face, this time a CGI-assisted view of that face, ravaged and with most of its bottom half missing. Making Silva’s mouth the site of his disfigurement, Skyfall suggests the value of Bardem’s face – his smile in particular – to his star image and sex appeal.

While Bardem’s turn in To the Wonder earned him no major acting awards or nominations, his Skyfall performance garnered him a dozen nominations or awards. Even accounting for To the Wonder’s lower profile, we can discern in the accolades for Skyfall a critical appetite for camp, audience-pleasing performances, either as complement or antidote to the many sexually compromised, morose characters Bardem has embodied in the 2000s. Overall, the case of Bardem reveals assets on which actors draw to occupy emotionally and thematically coded film worlds and to engage audiences. His 2000s roles in particular demonstrate shifting performance strategies responsive to generic and formal preferences of mainstream Hollywood and transnational art and prestige cinema. His recent roles mostly withhold bodily display but maintain the actor’s sexual charisma by emphasizing vocal performance, facial expressions and body language. These films also offer aesthetic support such as flattering lighting, shot selection and sound mixes to grant Bardem’s characters primacy. In many cases, distinctively awful hairstyles also allow him to stand out. His modified, asymmetrical Prince Valiant haircut in No Country for Old Men, his orange-yellow hair in Skyfall and his electrified look in The Counselor follow equally eye-catching styles in previous work outside Spanish cinema: a more severe Prince Valiant style in Perdita Durango, for example, and later the flowing locks of the Spanish inquisitor in Goya’s Ghosts. Even in Biutiful, in the opening dream sequence, the youthful version of his character’s father remarks on his hairstyle, advising him, ‘You shouldn’t go with the ponytail. It makes you look like a fox’. As with the films that provide him with prosthetic makeup or extravagant costumes, unconventional hairstyles can relieve Bardem of the burden to act in physically ostentatious ways, allowing him to channel intensity in other directions. In films such as Skyfall and The Counselor, though, Bardem combines extravagant hair and outfits with ostentatious physicality. Still, even when playing strongly psychologized characters, Bardem’s performances draw substantially on a physical register, conveying viscerality rather than surface characteristics.

Bardem and transnational stardom

Scholarship on Bardem’s work beyond Spanish cinema repeatedly stresses the implications of his transnational mobility and consequent embodiment of screen cosmopolitanism. Even early in Bardem’s transition to international stardom, Santiago Fouz-Hernández notes that in playing a range of nationalities and ethnicities, Bardem ‘blurs frontiers, revealing the ultimate instability of seemingly fixed sexual and national identities’ (2005, 203). More recently, Miguel Fernández Labayen and Vicente Rodríguez Ortega observe that ‘Bardem has surpassed exoticizing accounts [of] transnationalism built upon linguistic markedness, sexual rawness, and cultural difference’ (2013, 166). As he approaches middle age, his screen sex appeal remains a valuable commodity. Owing not so much to his age as to differing production conditions and storytelling requisites, recent films less often put him in explicitly erotic situations, particularly situations calling for him to appear unclothed. By The Counselor, he appears credible in the role of an ageing playboy, anxious about not only the financial worries that lead to his involvement in ruthless narcos’ cocaine trafficking but also about a manliness insufficient to match up to his sexually aggressive (if only slightly younger) lover, played by Cameron Diaz. As if to compensate, his character, Reiner, talks lustily and almost incessantly about sex (as do most other principals when not describing violent ways to die). He spends much more time onscreen describing sex than engaging in it, so as with many of his English-language roles, Bardem’s vocal performance signals his sexual availability more than physical displays or actions do. While Reiner often speaks breathlessly – out of lust, fear or both – he retains the accented speech that marks Bardem as bilingual. The actor also maintains to an extent the measured cadences that have defined his work in English-language film, and which help frame him as a cosmopolitan rather than provincial figure.

Sexual charisma underwrites a substantial portion of Bardem’s filmography. Some of his recent roles merge sexual charisma with diabolical tendencies, most memorably in Skyfall in his character’s efforts to intimidate Daniel Craig’s Bond with sexual innuendo. In other cases as he moves into middle age, he and filmmakers intermittently draw on his ability to play characters driven by intellectual or ideological passions rather than carnal ones. Films such as The Sea Inside and Biutiful convey his characters’ vulnerability because he so convincingly displays magnetic authority – mobilizing sexual charisma, exteriorized passion, adult outrage or insult, and more. Across his work in the 2000s and now 2010s, Bardem has refined his youthful, sexual, masculine energy into characterizations founded on ideological conviction or conflict, on experiences of trauma and dispossession, and even on inexplicable existential malice. His emergence as a major global star coincides with his construction in film and celebrity culture as an international sex symbol. In this respect, sex appeal becomes an essential component of Bardem’s transnational stardom. His career choices and evolving performance style indicate just some of the ways a performer with a discrete reputation in a mid-sized national cinema – a sexy Spaniard lauded locally and then internationally as a distinctive dramatic talent – finds successful footing in global art and popular cinema.

Notes on contributor

Mark Gallagher is Associate Professor of Film and Television Studies at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Another Steven Soderbergh Experience: Authorship and Contemporary Hollywood (University of Texas Press, 2013), Action Figures: Men, Action Films and Contemporary Adventure Narratives (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006) and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai (BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming), and is co-editor of East Asian Film Noir (I.B. Tauris, 2015).

Notes

1. Implicitly referencing both Bardem’s visual appeal and his professional skills, one profile observes that ‘if Mr. Bardem is quick to say that what he sees in the mirror is a shy, broken-nosed hypochondriac, the rest of the world has a more flattering take’ (Hohenadel 2001, MT4).

2. Conan, TBS television (USA), 8 November 2012. The segment in question appears at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J3MRzq6H620 (accessed 10 July 2013).

3. In the US, The Sea Inside did not earn Bardem major acting awards, although it did receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Achievement in Makeup. In effect, the Academy praises the film’s makeup artists for the challenging work of obscuring Bardem’s good looks.

4. Perriam (2011) offers a compelling analysis of Goya’s Ghosts in terms of cinematography and historical pageantry, and insightfully frames Bardem’s acting and stardom in that and other Bardem works of the 2000s.

5. See, for example, Paterniti (2012), a profile introduced with the phrase ‘Michael Paterniti talks to the gifted chameleon actor’.

6. In making Bond the explicit audience for Silva’s walk, Skyfall conforms to another of Naremore’s points about film acting, that ‘[p]resentational theatrics are possible in movies, but usually they are played for a fictional audience inside the film’ (1988, 30; original emphasis).