Javier Bardem

“There’s a certain tenderness that is captured by the camera in all his performances and a kind of masculine nobility that appears in all his characters.”

(…) “He said, ‘I want to try blonde.’ I was like, ‘I don’t think that’s going to work.’ He came on. ‘I think that might work. Let’s try and work on the look a little bit.’ That’s when we worked on his eyes, reconstructing his face because of what happened to him all those years ago, then we had the idea of the teeth. Then, it gradually percolated. It just grew in that lovely way that it does when you’ve got a really good writer and a really good actor and you’ve got people with the right ideas. The way he played the last scene with Judi is, I think amazing. He does stuff in that scene that shouldn’t make logical sense, it made absolute sense when you come at it at that point in the character’s story. It’s so odd and disconcerting and it’s just wonderful, and that’s him. Those were his ideas. He brought that all himself.” (…)

Javier Bardem as Silva, on set of Skyfall.

Hello James, welcome. Do you like the island? My grandmother had an island when I was a boy. Nothing to boast of. You could walk along it in an hour. But for us it was paradise. One summer, we came for a visit and discovered the whole place had become infested with rats. They came on a fishing boat and gorged on the coconut. So how do you get rats off an island? My grandmother showed me. You put an oil drum in a pit and hinge open the lid. Then you coat the lid in the coconut. The rats come for the coconut and plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink, plink; they fall into the trap. Then what do you do? Throw it in the ocean? Burn it? No. You just leave it. And then one by one… They start eating each other until there are only two left. The two survivors. Then what do you do? Kill them? No. You release them into the trees. But they will not eat coconut anymore. Now they will only eat rat. You have changed their nature. The two survivors, this is what she made us.