Halfway through the new James Bond movie, Skyfall, comes a magnetically creepy scene in which villain Raoul Silva has Bond immobilized in a chair while he wantonly explores his victim’s body. The scene is effectively uncomfortable, which costar Javier Bardem explains was all part of the process.
“I have to create uncomfortable situations beyond fear and terror,” Bardem told Celebuzz about the methods of his mad man. “The way to try to unbalance the security of Mr. Bond is to create something unexpected, and that also implies the physicality.”
Daniel Craig maintains the scene was played as scripted, but wasn’t sure how to interpret Bardem’s portrayal, gay or straight.
“I don’t see the world in sexual divisions,” said Craig. “I don’t know what he’s doing. He’s f***ing Berenice as well in the movie. So is he gay or straight? He just likes sex. He just likes the touch of another; he’s not gay or straight or whatever. He’s just doing what he’s doing. He’s f***ing with me and I f*** back with him, and that’s what makes the scene work.”
Silva is ex-MI6, a former spy who went rogue after he claims he was left to die in the field. Like any trusty soldier, he dutifully swallowed his cyanide capsule to avoid having State secrets tortured out of him. The problem is, he didn’t die — the poison pill merely left him grossly disfigured and mad with revenge.
“I see people behind those roles – villains,” said Bardem. “In this case, he’s a broken man, a man that is damaged.”
It’s not the Spanish actor’s first time playing a villain. He memorably won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Anton Chigurh in the Coen Brother’s 2007 noir No Country for Old Men.
“That was different because there was no man behind it,” Bardem said about his shark-eyed character blazing a bloody path through a desert landscape. “He was a symbolic idea. That’s the way the Coen brothers told me at the very beginning.”
Aside from a casual propensity for violence, the two villains have something else in common: hilarious hair.
While Bardem sported a bizarre bowl cut from the seventies for No Country, in Skyfall he wears a bleached out wig with dyed eyebrows.
“I don’t believe in creating a look because you want to have fun,” Bardem professed. “When you watch the movie, you understand why the man looks like that. You know who he is and what he’s gone through.”
Craig was a longtime fan of Bardem before the two met on set. In fact, he was instrumental in offering the actor the part, contacting him directly. Little did he know that Bardem had fallen in love with Bond villains since the age of 12 when he saw Richard Kiel play Jaws, a giant henchman with stainless steel teeth, in 1979’s Moonraker.
“I just felt that asking him would be the best way forward,” suggested Craig. “And thankfully he said yes. He’s an incredibly generous man and very funny. We laughed a lot when we weren’t working.”
Ironically, Bardem confessed that he doesn’t like violence in movies. He says he only took No Country because he saw it as a movie about the senselessness of violence.
As for Skyfall, “Yes, it’s violent, but it’s James Bond,” he shrugged, adding with a wink, “Also I’m an actor and I have to get jobs.”
