Javier Bardem is back doing Cormac McCarthy, and with even crazier hair.

The Spanish thesp won a Supporting Actor Academy Award for playing the strangely coiffed, stone-cold killer Anton Chigurh in “No Country for Old Men,” the Coen brothers’ equally acclaimed, 2007 adaptation of McCarthy’s blood-drenched novel.

Now there is “The Counselor,” the philosopher poet of Southwest brutality’s first-ever original screenplay. Directed by Ridley Scott (“Alien,” “Gladiator,” “American Gangster”), the film stars Michael Fassbender as the never-named title character, an El Paso attorney who gets involved in one of those illegal drug deals that goes from horribly to calamitously wrong in McCarthyland.

The impressive cast also includes Cameron Diaz, Brad Pitt and the real-life Mrs. Bardem, Penelope Cruz.

Bardem plays Reiner, a large-living nightclub operator who’s in on the Counselor’s deal. Reiner is the polar opposite of taciturn, intimidating Chigurh. Motormouthed and fundamentally insecure, self-styled cool guy Reiner has a wardrobe of crazy glasses and retina-scorching, vintage Versace print shirts. His mop of spiked hair screams out in all directions, again a complete contrast to Chigurh’s deceptively bumpkinish bowl cut.

“Cormac was on the set almost every day,” Bardem reports. “We would talk a little bit; I didn’t want to bother him with questions. But he was kind of shocked by my haircut again.”

Opportunities for screwy ’dos aren’t the main draws to McCarthy stories — nor limited to them, as anyone who has seen Bardem’s golden-rugged bad guy in “Skyfall” can attest.

“I like McCarthy as an author,” Bardem, 44, says. “There are many things that he wrote that make points about many facts and layers of our society. Especially, also, as an actor, it’s very like a gift to have those long scenes with those powerful dialogs to play.”

Reiner waxes extensively about everything from building a personal ethics code to the latest assassination technology. Romance is a particular pet topic.

“He has this relationship with Cameron’s character, called Malkina, that is based on fear,” Bardem observes. “That’s why he talks so much about women, because he is really scared to death of them.”

Bardem has no scenes with his wife in the movie; Cruz plays the Counselor’s lover, a relative innocent in this rattlesnake nest, except for when she’s in bed. Along with its spasms of graphic violence and airy existential riffing, “The Counselor” boasts some of the rawest sexual conversations ever heard in a Hollywood studio drama.

And none are kinkier than Reiner’s description of an evening involving him, Malkina and the windshield of a sports car.

“It wasn’t just another day at the office,” Bardem says of the sequence, which he both describes to Fassbender and is seen in NSFW flashbacks. “Of course it’s so — I don’t think beautifully is the word — amazingly written, the details and images. When I read that scene, it came to me organically, the need of playing that scene. It’s funny, but it also shows the fear of my character towards her and towards their relationship. I tell you, it was a brilliant scene, and we had a lot of fun doing it, all of us. First I did it with Michael and then I did it with Cameron.”

And then they did it with cheetahs. Yes, along with everything else, Reiner and Malkina keep two of the superfast predators as pets. The cats made work on the film’s Spanish exteriors, well, interesting (interiors were shot in England, and it all convincingly subs for Texas and Mexico).

“Of course, they are very well-trained,” Bardem recalls. “But they are wild animals. Once they stepped out of the truck onto the set, nobody could move or make a noise; they will immediately pay attention to that, and it’s a threat to them. You should have seen everybody standing still, without breathing, when those animals were on the set because they tell you in less than a second, you will be dead. They are that fast.

“That said, the people taking care of them knew a lot about them, of course. One day, we all even had a chance to pet them. It was a very amazing experience. They purred, with those eyes looking at you. They are beautiful animals.”

Photogenic as they were, the cheetahs were rarely competition for Bardem’s onscreen appearance.

“I based all my character on a line that he repeats constantly in the script, which is ‘I don’t know, I don’t want to know,’” the actor says. “The glasses also come from there. I don’t really think he needs glasses, but he wears those glasses with different colors because he doesn’t want to see the real world.

“Also, I wanted to have something in his look, which was the hair, that shows you he’s not holding any values or any ideas. The way he dresses, too … he has to be really out there. It’s a very free character in some ways, but he’s also very stuck in his own fears. So what he’s showing the world, the way he wants to be perceived, is the opposite. It’s like a man in character.”

With his Oscar, success in the Bond film and popularity among international auteurs from his own country’s Pedro Almodovar to Woody Allen, Terrence Malick, Alejandro González Iñárritu and Milos Forman, Bardem now views himself professionally as a man of the world. Considering Spain’s long-running financial problems, it couldn’t have come at a better time.

“I don’t see a course that implies nationality,” he says. “I don’t really care about where a movie comes from, just whether I want to be part of it or not. Thank God, I’m very fortunate that I have the opportunity to work outside [Spain] also, especially with how my country is now. It’s a pity.”