Javier Bardem is Biutiful

TORONTO – Ask Javier Bardem about the scene in his new movie, Biutiful, where his character is dying of cancer and is shown wearing an adult diaper, and he says you’re not the first to mention it.

"It’s funny," he says. "A lot of people are bringing that question. I didn’t know that would have such an impact on people."

Well, it’s not every day you see a movie star – Bardem is an Oscar winner for his role as the killer in No Country For Old Men – in such a vulnerable position.

"But what’s a movie star?" says Bardem. "You are an actor because you want to see the world in different eyes, and those eyes at that moment are very strong eyes, trying to lose your self-pity by putting all the energy you have in keeping on surviving. That’s the value of that scene, and not if I’m going to look bad or ridiculous in it. Actually, that day, we had a lot of fun."’

And then, with some irony, the man who shared the best actor award at last year’s Cannes Film Festival for playing a character who is dying of cancer takes another puff of a cigarette he is enjoying in a non-smoking room of a non- smoking hotel in the biggest city of a non-smoking country.

Bardem is at the Toronto International Film Festival to promote Biutiful ("It helps the movie to be seen," he says of his Cannes acting award. "To say, `Hmmm, what is that?’ That is basically what any award is.").

Biutiful also landed Bardem an Oscar nomination for best actor. It is a film with an impressive pedigree – it was directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, most famous for Babel – but it needs some careful marketing, because it’s a tricky one to explain.

Bardem plays Uxbal, a kind of fixer in Barcelona who helps bring illegal Chinese immigrants into Spain to work in factories, and illegal African immigrants to sell the purses they make on the streets. He’s also involved in a dysfunctional marriage to a bipolar woman, and raising two children on his own while he copes with some bad medical news. It’s a character that touches on a lot of current issues, all centred on Bardem’s sympathetic performance.

He says he came to the film because he always wanted to work with Inarritu: "He’s a great actor’s director. He plays the right notes, he gives you the time, he knows there is a human being there, going through a process. He doesn’t push you. And also, he takes very good care in the editing room, which is as important as on the set." Bardem also had an emotional response to the character of Uxbal.

"You realize there is a struggle going on there that is going to help that character to learn something. And then, once you are in the boat, sailing, you want to bring your own ideas and dreams and visions to the character. But there is also the need of knowing it’s a fiction, it’s a game."

That was the special part of Biutiful: the fact that Bardem worked with the young actors who played his children in the film. He says he and Inarritu had to make sure they knew that what they were seeing – the angry fighting of their movie parents – was just a fiction.

"You don’t want those little kids to go back home with that weight on their shoulders,"’ he says. "And watching them react to that helped me a lot to do my job, because when Alejandro says, ‘Cut,’ they will come back to their toys and be goofy and laughing. And I said, `That’s the way to act."’

Bardem says he felt that kind of pleasure when he began acting in school, but when people grow up, they begin to take themselves too seriously. The kids helped bring him back.

"This movie was a very good opportunity to let me see the world from a different point of view, because you need to detach yourself emotionally. You’re this guy for five months, five days a week, you need to put some barriers, bounds. Bounds or barriers? Bounds?"’

Both, probably, for a character like this. Biutiful is a film set in a world of violence, another irony, because Bardem doesn’t like violent films, even though of all his roles – the love interest in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, where he acted with his partner Penelope Cruz, the quadriplegic in The Sea Inside, the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls – he’s best known as the killer in No Country For Old Men. That movie had some scenes he found difficult to do.

"I don’t like to kill people in movies," he says. "I don’t go to see those movies – I mean, never. It’s not my cup of tea."

Biutiful, though, presents a different kind of violence.

"In this case, there’s a human being in a very violent world, trying to find peace for himself and for his kids, which is something we can relate to. Because that’s the world for a lot of people: living in extreme conditions and still trying to have a dignified life."

In the film, those are the immigrants, another issue that engages him.

"In this occidental world, more and more, I’m not discovering fire, when I say we are building a comfortable way of living based on the misery of others, " Bardem says.

"I like this movie, because it goes beyond the numbers. They are not numbers anymore. You see people behind them. And of course, you realize, at the end, we all want the same things, and it’s sad to know there are people who really don’t have those moral codes."