🎧Javier Bardem's Art of Darkness; My Top 10 Movies of 2024
The star of 'Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story' tells me how he found a 'lack of empathy' in his character
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When Javier Bardem first took the phone call from Ryan Murphy, he didn’t know much at all about the lavish world of Beverly Hills in the late 1980s, much less the infamous Menendez murders that captivated the community and the country.
So he did what anyone would do.
“I dug into Google and was like, ‘holy shit,’” Bardem, a native of Madrid, recalls on this week’s episode of the Prestige Junkie podcast. “Okay, this stuff is intense.”
“Intense” is probably an understatement for what Bardem and his co-stars embark on in Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story, which recreates not only the infamous 1989 murder of Jose and Kitty Menendez by their sons, but also Jose’s decades of alleged abuse of his children. Jose Menendez is far from the only dark character Bardem has taken on — after all, he won an Oscar as one of cinema’s most iconic villains in 2007’s No Country for Old Men — but becoming Jose was a particular challenge.
“I try to more or less navigate through my own judgment, my own ideas, my own ethics, my own opposition to a person like that,” says Bardem. “I’m trying to recreate that lack of empathy for his own mistakes, his own flaws, and try to strengthen that lack of mercy towards himself and toward other men.” Though Menendez was from Cuba and Bardem is from Spain, he found cultural similarities that resonated: “ We hold lots of similarities in terms of how we were educated back then, on how to be a man, and what a man was supposed to mean.”
Bardem, 55, who was also a standout in Dune: Part Two earlier this year, plans to follow up this heavy television role with yet another one; he’s set to star in an Apple TV+ remake of Cape Fear, playing the absolutely terrifying Max Cady. But in recent years he’s balanced these kinds of villainous turns with lighter work, including his Oscar-nominated role as Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos and a performance that’s extremely close to my heart — the singing and dancing magician Hector P. Valenti in the 2022 children’s film Lyle Lyle Crocodile.
Full disclosure: I’ve been wanting to ask Bardem about this performance ever since Lyle came out and quickly became a favorite with my children; his full-throated performance is a marvel, particularly in the kind of low-stakes children’s film where talented actors can often be tempted to phone it in. But I never expected the story Bardem told me about the film, and what inspired him to take it on in one of the darkest moments of his life.
“One of the things that my mother said before passing away was, ‘I want you to do that movie for your kids and for everybody’s kids.’”
Bardem’s mother Pilar Bardem, an acclaimed actress in Spain, died in 2021, months before Lyle began filming. “The only thing that I wanted to do was just to put my head under the Earth, because I love my mother so much that I couldn’t step out of my own room,” Bardem remembers about that time. Instead, he stepped into the shoes of an optimistic, slightly ridiculous magician — and realized how right his mother had been. “That movie taught me how art and creativity can really pull you out of the darkest times.”
Hear the full conversation with Bardem on this week’s podcast, which also includes the first of a two-part series between me and The Ankler’s own Richard Rushfield wrapping up the year in film. We each come with our own top 10 films to discuss, from the underseen gems Richard has been raving about all year to the major best picture contenders that we actually agree deserve to be remembered.
