Chigurh: the ultimate psycho

How Bardem's Anton Chigurh became Hollywood's ultimate doer of evil.

In Cormac McCarthyland there is a gas station store proprietor who doesn't make small talk anymore. You have seen his type - the over familiar ones that ask annoying questions when all you want is to pay up and drive on.

"Y'all gettin' any rain up your way?" he asks a man with a ludicrous page boy haircut who drives a Dallas plate car into his gas station. What follows in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men sets a new template for thrillers in Hollywood.

The conversation between the proprietor and Anton Chigurh, the film's psychotic hitman is insanely irrelevant and tense till the inscrutable Chigurh asks him: "What's the most you have lost on a coin toss?"

He tosses a coin and asks the old man to call it. By now no one's breathing, not the old man on screen, not one in the movie theatre.

Chigurh has just walked us all to the edge. Before he walks out of the door, he tells the proprietor to put away that lucky quarter. "Not in your pocket, where it'll get mixed in with the others and become just a coin. Which, it is."

The Ministry of Evil
Not since Hannibal Lecter's casual admission to dining on an inquisitive census taker's liver with fava beans and chianti in The Silence of the Lambs has a conversation in Hollywood history invoked such terror.

There's no violence, but the suggestion of what could have happened to the poor old man is such a powerful one. Javier Bardem's Oscar winning turn as Chigurh is not so much about the intensity with which he puts away his victims, as it is about the fact that the 38-year-old gives Chigurh's character such depth.

Here's a man with an obtuse sense of humour, who is stoic and philosophical, someone who can be downright clumsy one moment, but can kill with a clinical nonchalance the next.

His confessions could give a priest a coronary, yet he is the only one in the movie who lives by his principles.

When he places his bizarre murder accessory - a pneumatic cattle gun - on the forehead of a commuter he's flagged down, there is a moment of absolute calm, like a doctor checking a man's pulse.

For a second, there is nervous anticipation in the man's eyes and then bang! - Chigurh blows a clean hole through the poor man's head, his blood blotting the Texan tarmac.

As a cinematic villain, Chigurh is, arguably, at the head of a table that seats Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter, Jack Nicholson's Jack Torrance from The Shining and Anthony Perkins's Norman Bates from Psycho.

lf likes to think of a Chigurh as a symbol of violent fate. "When violence shows up, it's impossible to destroy, it only creates misery and pain, and doesn't get you anywhere," he was quoted as saying in a recent interview.

In the lead-up to the Academy Awards in February, the 38-year-old Spaniard's performance swept everything - the Golden Globes, Screen Actor's Guild and the British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) awards, so despite the massive hype machinery working for him, there were many who weren't the least surprised when he took home the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor.

Early days
Born in to a family of actors in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria, Spain, Bardem made his screen debut at the age of six in El Picaro (The Scoundrel).

However, it was not until his turn as a young wannabe bullfighter in the critically acclaimed dark comedy Jamon, Jamon that the world took notice.

The actor has gone on record to say that he went from being a "nobody" one day to "somebody" the next.

Bardem was seen in a string of Spanish films including acclaimed director Pedro Almodovar's Live Flesh where he played a paraplegic policeman.

In 2000 he picked up his first Academy Award nomination, best actor, for playing gay Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls.

In order to get into the skin of his character, Bardem learnt how to speak Spanish with a Cuban accent, lost more than 15kgs and learnt how to kiss a man like he meant it. The Oscar nod ensured he was now mobbed by fans in Madrid and invited to dinner by King Juan Carlos.

His rugged good looks and easy charm ensured that the roles kept coming, but Bardem refused to be typecast. Almodovar once said of Bardem: "There's a certain tenderness that is captured by the camera in all his performances, and a kind of masculine nobility that appears in all his characters."

By now Hollywood also had noticed the Spaniard's talent and in 2002 John Malkovich cast him in the lead role of a detective in his directorial debut The Dancer Upstairs. In 2004, Bardem starred as paralysed fisherman Ramon Sampredo in The Sea Inside, a film that won the Best Foreign Language film at the Academy Awards.

We don't know if things have changed post his Oscar win, but when asked about the importance of the Oscars, Bardem once said: "I live in Spain. Oscars are something that are on TV Sunday night, basically, very late at night. You don't watch, you just read the news after to see who won or who lost. The award is important in order to bring people to the movie theatre. That's the only principal meaning of any award."

That haircut
A former member of the Spanish national rugby team, Bardem studied art and took up odd jobs before he drifted into acting as a full-time career.

The actor says he agreed to the part of Anton Chigurh within minutes of meeting directors Joel and Ethan Coen. What he hadn't bargained for was that ludicrous haircut which will now go down in cinematic history as the worst haircut ever.

Bardem referred to it as the "worst haircut in history" while Academy Awards telecast host Jon Stewart referred to it as a haircut that combined "Hannibal Lecter's murderousness with Dorothy Hamill's wedge-cut."

Incidentally, the hairstyle is the handiwork of New Brunswick stylist Paul LeBlanc, who previously shared an Oscar for his work on Milos Forman's Amadeus. The look, Blanc said, was inspired by the mop tops of British warriors during the Crusades and 1960s haircuts.

The future's bright
Bardem beat Johnny Depp to the role of jilted lover Florentino Ariza in the adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera, a Mike Newell film which has so far met with a very tepid response in theatres.

This year, he will also be seen in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona alongside current squeeze Penelope Cruz and Allen's current favourite Scarlett Johansson.

There is speculation that Francis Ford Coppola has roped in the Spaniard alongside the dependable Matt Damon in 2009's Tetro. He will also be seen in Chicago-fame Rob Marshall's Nine.

The spotlight will continue to follow him. Malkovich calls Bardem the best actor in Europe. The Spaniard, however, thinks it's about being honest to his craft. In an interview, Bardem once said that acting is a mirror for people to watch themselves.

"It's some kind of a mirror where we can see the best and the worst of the human condition. That's my duty, to find that material and make it happen in front of an audience."