SHOOTING STAR BARDEM ON ROLES TO DIE FOR, ACTING IN ENGLISH, AND THAT GUY WHO BROKE HIS NOSE.

Byline: BOB STRAUSS

>FILM WRITER

With his versatile empathy and soulful, broken face, Javier Bardem has become one of Spain's most respected movie stars.

Hailing from a long line of actors, he made lots of naughty movies in the flush of artistic freedom that followed the death of dictator Francisco Franco, went on to become the first Spaniard nominated for a best actor Academy Award ("Before Night Falls") and further impressed with challenging, carefully chosen roles in the likes of "The Sea Inside," "Collateral" and "Goya's Ghosts."

Now, Bardem is dropping the biggest double whammy of his career. He plays Anton Chigurh in Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's acclaimed novel "No Country for Old Men," opening in select theaters today. The character is a literal embodiment of death who heartlessly, yet with his own peculiar sense of purpose, stalks the West Texas border region, methodically doling out destruction in the wake of a drug deal gone bad.

Next Friday, the 38-year-old actor can be seen as another literary icon, though one who could not be further opposite of Chigurh. He's gentle, love-addled Florentino Ariza, the Colombian protagonist of Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "Love in the Time of Cholera," whose 50-year devotion to a married woman that he cannot have leads him into hundreds upon hundreds of short, sweet and meaningless affairs.

It's quite a gamut, to say the least. And one that's been very impressively run.

>Chigurh is almost like a supernatural force. Talk about making such a character believable.

We all know that, no matter how evil you have to portray somebody, there always has to be room for humanity. Otherwise, you cannot relate to him as an audience, and it's like watching Superman or the Terminator. You go, "OK, he's a machine, right." Which in this case was quite difficult, because he is a machine, in a way, but with his own principles and codes. ... But how do we make that human without losing the fact that he is an icon? I just made him out-of-sync, made it a problem for him to make real connections with people.

How much did his stupid haircut help? Or hinder?

I heard that it came from a book Tommy Lee gave the Coens, with great photographs of dark places in Texas and New Mexico back in the 1960s -- dive bars, whorehouses -- and some customers of those places had that haircut. When I saw it, I was like, "Thank you, my friends, you already gave me 50 percent of the character." It was truly helpful, but not for my private life. But it explained the mechanical view of the character. It was like the perfect helmet; everything had to be in place.

What do you think "No Country" is saying about violence, especially through your character?

The question is, is it really justifiable, violence? And the answer is no. I mean, we all have dreamt or fantasized about killing somebody. But we have common sense, and the thing that makes us different from the animals is that we can control ourselves and have reason to say, "No, that would be a mistake." Some people cannot manage that. And some people with a lot of power, like presidents of countries, can justify violence as a method of resolving things. I think the point of the movie is that violence doesn't get you anywhere. There's a lot of violence, but all it brings is violence himself, my character.

Did you ever dream of killing the guy who broke your nose when you were younger?

Ha! That fight lasted a few minutes. I was 18 years old, and it came out of nowhere. Basically, I was in a place and a guy just felt like having fun with me, and apparently he did because he really broke my face. I didn't remember his face because he was like a flash, came at me sideways. But for some time, I would imagine seeing his face, I was seeing his face in everybody for the next three months. "That's the guy! No, that's the guy!" Did I dream of killing him? Yes, in a way you wanted him to disappear. But you wanted him to disappear before the action happened. You wanted him to never have been born.

"Cholera" must have been a welcome change from "Old Men."

It was a fresh shower. I remember the moment when I got off the plane in Cartagena, Colombia. There was the color, the heat, the people, the races there, the sensuality -- it was like, "Wow, man!" My heart burst wide open. It was like, "Come to life."

Making love to all of those beautiful actresses doesn't sound like bad work.

It's funny, because I went from Chigurh's haircut to being bald, because I had to wear many different wigs as Florentino. I lost a lot of weight for that one because I had to be like a stray dog, someone who walks very carefully because he doesn't want to be emotionally beat up again. So I felt anything but attractive, like the character.

Any trepidation about adapting such an honored work of literature?

Of course. You can avoid facing the responsibility of bringing that masterpiece of a novel to the screen and knowing that no movie in the world would ever match the book. But the reason why I did it, and what I saw on the screen, was that I think you can capture very well the essence of the novel. I thought it could be a good chance to bring people to the novel through the movie.

Have you gotten as comfortable acting in English now as you are in Spanish?

It's like a corset that you have to live with. I don't speak especially good English, and when you perform, expressing exactly what you feel is difficult. When you are performing, you have to let yourself go. And you can't let yourself go when you are having a judge in your mind telling you, "Watch the T," "Here's the pause," "Bring the tone." It's like, let me be, man! So it's very challenging. But once you conquer it, you feel free in another way. Because it is not your language, you are not shy with the words.

Wasn't your girlfriend an interpreter who helped you learn English?

Um, that was a time ago. I prefer not to talk about that, my friend.

OK, so I guess you don't have much to say about the rumors that you and Penelope Cruz are dating.

Next! (laughs)

You were part of this great Spanish film flowering, but now you work as much in Hollywood.

It's an accident that happened. It's nothing I was looking for, I just happened to be there at the right moment. Thank God I have it, because it's not that I don't want to work in Spain -- I'm dying to -- but I need material. And material is not always there. So I see myself as an immigrant, going to places where there is a demand. And now, here, there are more opportunities than there.

Bob Strauss [phone];

[e-mail]

O brothers, where art thy jokes?

It's not your typical Coen brothers movie, "No Country for Old Men."

It's funny in places, but there really aren't any jokes in it.

It's well-filmed, but free of their usual show-offy camera moves and bizarre angles.

There's a lot of violence, but it seems, well, like real violence, not the "gotcha" grotesquerie that made "Fargo" and "Blood Simple" so cool.

Oh, and this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel about killing and regret in 1980s Texas may not be everybody's idea of cool in some very basic ways. Key characters die offscreen or disappear into thin air, major antagonists barely meet (if ever), and the philosophical tone is taken very, demandingly seriously. Unlike, say, the philosophical tone of "O Brother, Where Art Thou?"

"Was it a conscious attempt to, um, knock it off?" Ethan Coen asks rhetorically. "Hmm. No. We never make those kinds of overall, abstract decisions and calculations. It was an adaptation of the book, and we liked the story; so we tried to serve the story."

Which in itself is not like your typical Hollywood thriller, with or without Coen quirks.

"We were aware of how unusually the story is structured," Ethan continues. "But I don't know how you could -- in a satisfying way -- turn it into something else. I mean, it is shocking in the novel, but it's not arbitrary. The story is about how unforgiving and capricious the world can be. It is unconventional, but if you were tempted to mess with that, why would you be tempted to make that book?"

"We didn't feel that anything was in conflict with some sort of larger dramatic idea that couldn't be satisfying for an audience," adds Joel Coen, Ethan's brother and filmmaking partner.

"Look, when you're doing something like this, you're aware that -- as I'm sure Cormac McCarthy is when he's writing a novel -- it might not be for everybody. When we make a movie, we're convinced enough that we're making it for enough people who will see it as an interesting sort of thing that we don't worry about it."

>B.S.

CAPTION(S):

4 photos, box

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) guns & roses

CONTRASTING ROLES COULD BRING BARDEM STARDOM IN U.S.

Fred Dufour>Getty Images

(2) Javier Bardem is a heartless, almost mechanical killer roaming rural West Texas in the Coen brothers' "No Country for Old Men."

(3) Ethan, left, and Joel Coen on the set of "No Country for Old Men," which is heavy on violence, light on humor.

(4) Javier Bardem right, in "Love in the Time of Cholera"

Box:

O brothers, where art thy jokes? (see text)