He leans into the brick wall, hugging himself. "It's the actor's insecurity: One day you're liked and the next it's ah, nah, not that guy. My mom told me, 'Just keep doing your job.' You get something gold, thank you. You suck, thank you. You keep on moving."

You suck. Those words make me laugh when he first says them at the restaurant; they aren't exactly the descriptors that come to mind when conjuring Bardem's talent. Bardem occupies an enviable place in the Hollywood constellation—his dignity remains intact—even though, as he points out, his career has been more like an anti-career. ("What career?" he says. "I've always been like, 'We're here now. Let's do this.' ") Where other Spanish actors left home early to try out American film, sometimes filling the token-Latin slot in a cast, Bardem's theory was simple if audacious: Pick great Spanish parts and eventually Hollywood would come calling.

Bardem's approach, then—to make his characters, however big or small, indelible—has made him pickier than most. "Even when he was poor," says his brother, Carlos, "he said no to roles all the time." When Steven Spielberg approached him to play Colin Farrell's part in Minority Report, Bardem offered a simple assessment of why the film wouldn't work for him: "I don't see myself running on roofs," he said. If he didn't believe in the role, he felt no one else would, either.

Bardem builds his characters with obsessive fidelity, most often in conjunction with his acting coach, Juan Carlos Corazza, whom he calls "a fucking genius." Their partnership is legend among the tight circle of actors in Madrid: Roughly twenty-five years ago, Corazza opened an acting school in Madrid, and Bardem, all of 18, with spiky hair and intact nose, was the first person through the door. Says Bardem's brother, "Juan Carlos is the best player, and Javier is his best instrument, his masterwork." Bardem returns to Corazza's acting school once a year, even now, usually for a month, to take classes.

"You see actors of 17, 18, 20 doing stuff, and you think, 'How old my tools are, how old I am,' " says Bardem. "It's a place where I can go to do it wrong, and after the others see me fail onstage, they say, 'He's got the same fucking issues that we do.' "

The brothers Bardem have a word for trying not to suck. "When we go to acting class, we're like bors: We say, 'Let's go train,' " Carlos says. "My brother brings such ease to his roles, but that doesn't show the months, and sometimes years, of training to get it right. And he can be a pain in the ass: If you're his director, get ready for a thousand questions."

Mendes, with whom Bardem spent eighteen months on-set filming, confirms the actor's obsession: "He does want to work very hard, to go over every full stop, every comma, every word. He would take his lines from the Bond script, translate it to Spanish, understand it, feel it, mold it, and translate it back again into English." In the instance of his other archvillain, Anton Chigurh, Brolin, his co-star in No Country, says: "He gained twenty-five pounds for that role, and he quit smoking. He was trying to get the accent right; I was trying to do a movie without speaking. He kept asking questions and getting back monosyllabic answers. All our insecurities were there, and we became very, very close. Later, when my kids were backpacking around Europe, he and Penélope took them in."

Bardem says that Corazza asked him what essence he was trying to convey through Chigurh. "That was the first character ever that I didn't try to build as a human, but as an idea," he says. "We arrived at the fact that I was violence. You call for it, and it has my haircut."