He may be the 9th Sexiest Man Alive according to People magazine, but Javier Bardem would rather let his work speak for itself

If there were an Oscar for worst haircut, Javier Bardem would snag it for his role in the Coen Brothers’ new thriller, No Country for Old Men. Playing the ruthless psychotic Anton Chigurh, who will stop at nothing to retrieve $2 million that’s been stolen from him by a foolhardy Texan (Josh Brolin), Bardem had to live with an unflattering side-parting-cum-comb-over for three months during the shoot.
“I guess the haircut helped us show that this man is insane but also normal,” he says. “But it’s hard to wake up and see yourself…taking a shower, you go, ‘Oh my God! I forgot it was me!’”

Sitting in a hotel room in Cannes, the Canary Islands-born actor is thankfully back to his usual short crop when we meet. Sporting some rather fetching sideburns, as well as a grey T-shirt with ‘Thunderbird’ written on it, he’s in an ebullient mood – undoubtedly because working with the sibling creators of Fargo was a long-held ambition of his. Not that it was easy. Adapted from the Cormac McCarthy novel, the script with its Texan vernacular was one of the most difficult he’s ever read.

“I had to translate the whole script for myself, word by word, with a dictionary, trying to see what it was behind those words,” he snorts. “It took me two weeks!”

What with this and the succession of bad hair days, it’s a role that evidently left its mark on Bardem. Calling Chigurh a “kind of Terminator but with more of a broken soul”, taking on a character motivated by hate, anger and pain truly got under Bardem’s skin.

“I felt sometimes too detached emotionally from people, like I was holding something not nice inside of me,” he says. “It’s weird, schizophrenic, but it’s true. You have to let it go. With Chigurh, every time I shot, I had thirty minutes [afterwards] of rolling on the floor, with pillows on the floor, getting the violence out of me, because it made me nervous.”

Certainly No Country for Old Men shows just how far the 38 year-old Bardem is willing to push aside the heartthrob image that he cultivated at the outset of his career, working for Bigas Luna on Spanish-language films like Jamón, jamón and Golden Balls.

Read the rest of our interview with Javier  in our February 2008 issue: click here to subscribe.