Holiday Habits
The Oscar-winning Spanish actor talks travel
INTERVIEW JUDI DAVIDSON
Javier Bardem
“WHEN I WAS 20 YEARS OLD I TOOK TWO months off and went alone to Brazil. That was an experience. I came back stronger. I had fun too. Say Brazil, and all these images come to mind: beaches, palm trees, coconut water, samba, those little bikini things?
“But my home is in Spain. I live in Madrid, and my football team is Atlético Madrid. I come from a family of actors and I am very attached to Spanish cinema – so although I love other places too, Spain is home.
“There’s something really inside of me that needs and wants to work in my own language, which is partly why I made one of my new films, Biutiful, in Barcelona. It was a tough role. But if you want to be an actor, you have to be really open, let yourself be taken by emotions. The difficult thing is how to get back to yourself again afterwards.
“I work really hard to try to make people believe it. In Vicky Cristina Barcelona I was like: ‘Who in the world is going to believe that these women are killing each other for me?’ But Woody Allen thought it was going to be right, I just had to lose a lot of weight!
“That film stereotypes people. First, Woody makes fun of them. He introduces the clichés in a very plain way for us to see, like: ‘Wow. Latin lover. American tourists. Spain. Wine. Come on!’ But then he makes fun of that, and starts to destroy that for us, to see that behind those clichés there are people who share the same fears, the same dependence, the same goals.
“As for the rest of Spain, well it has beautiful places but I’m not going to tell you where because then everyone will know! The south of Spain is beautiful and the food in the north is great – I would love to eat a good piece of steak there. My most recent travels were to Bali to make Eat Pray Love with Julia Roberts.
I like the way they interact with nature there. There are fruits you can only imagine and beautiful Thai food. It’s very shocking to see how little we are and what our real place on this planet Earth is, because it’s huge. Besides that I was very happy to be at the beach!”
EAT PRAY LOVE IS OUT IN EUROPE IN SEPTEMBER. BIUTIFUL DOES NOT HAVE A RELEASE DATE YET.
FLY TO BARCELONA (EL PRAT, GIRONA AND REUS) FROM 69 DESTINATIONS. FLY TO MADRID FROM 38 DESTINATIONS. VISIT www.RYANAIR.COM
