Salon.com > Javier Bardem

Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem expecting second child

Wed, 13 Feb 2013 14:13:00 +0000

MADRID — Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem are expecting their second child.

Cruz publicist Javier Giner told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the Spanish actress is pregnant.

He declined to provide any further details, including when the baby is due.

The 38-year-old Cruz and 43-year-old Bardem had their first child, a boy called Leo, in January 2011.

The couple became romantically involved after appearing together in Woody Allen's 2008 film "Vicky Cristina Barcelona" and later married.

Cinema’s 11 most memorable LGBT villains

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 19:15:00 +0000

James Bond movies have always been charged with sexual innuendo and cast with the occasional homicidal bad guy with a swish, his flamboyance winking at us, alerting us to his homosexuality. But in "Skyfall," the latest installment of the James Bond franchise, there is no winking, no subtext whatsoever. The gay villain — Javier Bardem's platinum-blond-tressed, plastic-surgically tweaked Raoul Silva — is out of the closet. And with this introduction, Silva enters the pantheon of cinematic LGBT evildoers who offer something extraordinary to the commonplace villain: a motive that doubles as a kind of apologia. Because in the movies, LGBT villains appear as either brooding and fiercely guarded or sinister and effete, signifying that these aren't your run-of the-mill bad people. These are villains who are victims of society, their crimes born out of depraved sexuality, unrequited love, self-hatred, gender dysphoria or a desperate need to feel normal. Until the mid- to late '90s, most of the LGBT portrayals on the big and small screens were of killers or sad sacks — or sad-sack killers. So, is it progress that Raoul Silva is aboveboard about his sexuality? Or have we regressed to the same-old offensive depictions? Let's review some of the most memorable big-screen evildoers on the higher end of the Kinsey scale.

“Skyfall”: Bi-curious Bond?

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 20:27:00 +0000

Reinventing the James Bond franchise to fit the sexual and cultural politics of the 21st century is a dicey proposition at best, and it’s safe to say we’ve seen mixed results so far. If Daniel Craig’s 2006 debut as Bond in “Casino Royale” was a smashing success, bringing a new physicality and cinematic verve to the series along with a touch of real-world anomie, the dour and violent “Quantum of Solace” arguably went too far in the latter direction. (I actually thought it was an interesting experiment, if not an entirely successful one, but fans who complained that it didn’t seem much like a Bond movie were correct.) That $225 million misstep nearly succeeded in killing off the series – which left the world of Ian Fleming’s novels behind long, long ago – but now Bond and Craig are back in “Skyfall,” a rich, impressive, overstuffed and rather chilly spectacle that already looks like the biggest hit in franchise history, even before its American release.

Bardem: I’ll say “whatever the hell I think is right”

Thu, 18 Oct 2012 18:48:00 +0000

It’s tempting to feel skeptical about celebrities’ involvement with humanitarian crises, which can appear to be more concerned with generating favorable publicity for glittering A-list parties than with helping the people of Tibet or Darfur or Eritrea. But Javier Bardem has little to gain, and a fair amount to lose, in trying to focus international attention on the unsolved and seemingly unsolvable problem of the Western Sahara. That thinly populated patch of desert in northwestern Africa — which is not yet an independent country but not quite a colony either — is a tangled and painful piece of Cold War blowback that the major world powers have been eager to sweep under the carpet.

Since 2008, when he first visited the Algerian refugee camps where up to 150,000 Sahrawis — the formerly nomadic people native to the Western Sahara — have lived for more than three decades, Bardem has become a leading international activist on an issue that few in the Western world even know about, let alone want to touch. Right now Bardem is using the publicity platform provided by his villain role in the upcoming James Bond adventure “Skyfall” to spread the word about a much smaller project, a memorable and moving documentary on the Sahrawi crisis called “Sons of the Clouds,” which he produced.