Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem (born 1 March 1969) is a Spanish actor. In a career spanning over three decades, he has received various accolades, including an Academy Award, a BAFTA Award, a Golden Globe Award, a Critics' Choice Movie Award, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, and seven Goya Awards, in addition to a Cannes Film Festival Award and two Volpi Cups.
Bardem is the son of actress Pilar Bardem. He first became known for such Spanish films as Jamón jamón (1992), Running Out of Time (1994), Boca a boca (1995), Live Flesh (1997), Mondays in the Sun (2002), and The Sea Inside (2004). He won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for his portrayal of Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers' crime film No Country for Old Men (2007). He was Oscar-nominated for playing Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (2000), a criminal with cancer in Biutiful (2010), and Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos (2021).
Bardem has also starred in auteur driven films such as Woody Allen's romantic drama Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), Terrence Malick's drama To the Wonder (2013), Darren Aronofsky's horror film Mother! (2017), Asghar Farhadi's mystery drama Everybody Knows (2018), Fernando León de Aranoa's The Good Boss (2021), and Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beloved (2026). He also acted in blockbuster films such as Eat Pray Love (2010), the James Bond film Skyfall (2012), the swashbuckler film Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales (2017), the science fiction epic films Dune (2021) and Dune: Part Two (2024), Disney's live-action remake The Little Mermaid (2023), and the sports action film F1 (2025).
On television, he portrayed José Menendez in the Netflix crime anthology series Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story (2024), for which he earned two Primetime Emmy Awards nominations for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie and Outstanding Limited or Anthology Series (as an executive producer) and Max Cady in the Apple TV thriller Cape Fear.
Bardem married actress Penélope Cruz in 2010 and together they have two children. In January 2018, Bardem became the ambassador of Greenpeace for the protection of Antarctica.
Javier Ángel Encinas Bardem was born on 1 March 1969 in Las Palmas, in the Canary Islands, Spain. His mother, Pilar Bardem (1939–2021), was an actress, and his father, José Carlos Encinas Doussinague (1931–1995), was the son of a cattle rancher from the province of Salamanca. According to Pilar's memoirs, José had a "capricious and violent will," and shot up the front door. He changed jobs more than 10 times, leading to evictions and the children going hungry. The two separated shortly after Javier's birth. His mother raised him and his elder siblings, Carlos and Mónica, alone (another sibling died shortly after birth), both of whom have also pursued an acting career. His father died of leukemia in 1995.
On his mother’s side, Bardem comes from a long line of filmmakers and actors dating back to the earliest days of Spanish cinema. He is a grandson of actors Rafael Bardem and Matilde Muñoz Sampedro (sister of actresses Mercedes and Guadalupe), and a nephew of screenwriter and director Juan Antonio Bardem. On the latter's side, he is a cousin of filmmaker Miguel Bardem. His uncle Juan Antonio was imprisoned by the Franco regime for his anti-fascist films. Bardem was brought up in the Roman Catholic faith by his grandmother.
As a child, he spent time at theatres and on film sets. In 1974, he made his first television appearance, in Fernando Fernán Gómez's television series El pícaro (The Scoundrel). He also played rugby for the junior Spanish National Team. Though he grew up in a family full of actors, Bardem did not see himself going into the family business, and painting was his preferred medium. He went on to study painting for four years at Madrid's Escuela de Artes y oficios. In need of money, he took acting jobs to support his painting but felt he was a bad painter and eventually abandoned it as a career.
In 1989, for the Spanish comedy show El Día Por Delante (The Day Ahead), he had to wear a Superman costume for a comedic sketch, a job that made him question whether he wanted to be an actor at all. Bardem also worked as a stripper (for one day) during his struggling acting career.
Bardem came to notice in a small role in his first major motion picture, The Ages of Lulu, when he was 21, in which he appeared along with his mother, Pilar Bardem. He also appeared in minor roles in Amo tu cama rica and High Heels. Bigas Luna, the director of Lulu, was sufficiently impressed to give him the leading male role in his next film, Jamón jamón in 1992, in which Bardem played a would-be underwear model and bullfighter. The film, which also starred his eventual wife Penélope Cruz, was a major international success. Bardem featured in Sancho Gracia's Huidos, and starred in Luna's next film Golden Balls (1993).
Bardem's talent did not go unnoticed in the English-speaking world. In 1997, John Malkovich was the first to approach him, then a 27-year-old, for a role in English, but he turned down the offer because his English was still poor. His first English-speaking role came that same year with director Álex de la Iglesia's in Perdita Durango, playing a santería-practicing bank robber.
2000–2011: Breakthrough and acclaim
After starring in about two dozen films in his native country, he gained international recognition in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls in 2000, portraying Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas. He received praise from his idol Al Pacino; the message Pacino left on Bardem's answering machine was something he considers one of the most beautiful gifts he has ever received. For that role, he received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor, becoming the first Spaniard to do so. Immediately after, he turned down the role of Danny Witwer in Minority Report which eventually went to Colin Farrell. Instead, in 2002, Bardem starred in Malkovich's directorial debut, The Dancer Upstairs. Malkovich originally had Bardem in mind for the role of the detective's assistant, but the movie's time trying to find financing gave Bardem time to learn English and take on the lead role of the detective. "I will always be grateful to him because he really gave me my very first chance to work in English", Bardem has said of Malkovich.
Bardem won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in Mar adentro, released in the United States as The Sea Inside (2004), in which he portrayed the quadriplegic turned assisted suicide activist Ramón Sampedro. He made his Hollywood major studio debut in a brief appearance as a crime lord who summons Tom Cruise's hitman to do the dirty work of dispatching witnesses in the crime action film Collateral. He starred in Miloš Forman's 2006 film Goya's Ghosts opposite Natalie Portman and Stellan Skarsgard, where he plays a twisted monk during the Spanish Inquisition.
In 2007, Bardem acted in two film adaptations: the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men with Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin by Cormac McCarthy, and Mike Newell's Love in the Time of Cholera with Giovanna Mezzogiorno by Gabriel García Márquez. In No Country for Old Men, he played a psychopathic assassin, Anton Chigurh. For that role, he became the first Spaniard to win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. He also won Golden Globe Award, Screen Actors Guild Award, Critics' Choice Award, and BAFTA Award in the same category.
Bardem's rendition of Chigurh's trademark quote, "What business is it of yours where I'm from, friendo?" (in response to the convenience store owner's query, "Y'all gettin' any rain up your way?"), was named Top HollyWORDIE of 2007 in the annual survey by the Global Language Monitor. Chigurh was named No. 26 in Entertainment Weekly magazine's 2008 "50 Most Vile Villains in Movie History" list. Bardem's life's work was honored at the 2007 Gotham Awards, produced by The Gotham Film & Media Institute. In 2014, Belgian psychiatry professor Samuel Leistedt and 10 associates watched 400 movies over the course of three years and identified 126 psychopathic characters: Bardem's rendition of Chigurh was voted the most realistic psychopath.