Actor uses interview to accuse Spain's government of using high unemployment rate as an excuse for cutting workers' rights

As cyberterrorist Raoul Silva in the latest James Bond film, Skyfall, Spanish actor Javier Bardem proves once again that he makes an ideal celluloid baddie.

But the actor who torments Daniel Craig's 007 and Judy Dench's M in the movie is now being cast as a different kind of villain by Spain's ruling conservative People's party (PP).

"You have to be a big crook, and not a film one, to say that high unemployment suits the government," tweeted senior PP deputy Rafael Hernando after reading a newspaper interview in which Bardem attacked the government of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.

The tweet was a response to the interview in El País newspaper, in which Bardem angrily accused the Rajoy government of using the country's 25% unemployment rate as an excuse for cutting back workers' rights.

"Such high unemployment suits the government so that labour conditions can be made terrible," Bardem said, saying that austerity measures were being imposed in order to pay off private bank debt.

"This government wants to pay off the country's debt with the pencils and notebooks of schoolchildren," he added.

Bardem comes from a family of militantly left-wing actors and has been seen at street demonstrations against the government, especially after it applied a huge rise in sales tax to cinema and theatre tickets.

His mother, Pilar, is a regular fixture at anti-government protests involving Spanish actors.

"This is the frivolity of a millionaire who lives in Miami," added Hernando.

Bardem and his partner, fellow Spanish actor Penelope Cruz, actually spends most of his time at the family's home in Madrid.

In Skyfall, the 43-year-old plays an embittered former MI6 agent intent on getting his revenge on the British spy agency.

In 2007 he won an Oscar for playing another baddie - Anton Chigurh in the film No Country for Old Men