Interview: Javier Bardem, actor

Javier Bardem's dedication was tested in his portrayal of an ill criminal in Biutiful. But the Spanish star wouldn't have it any other way

As a boy, from the age of about nine until well into his teens, the actor Javier Bardem would often help his mother, Pilar, an actress well known in Spain, learn her roles. At their home in Madrid she would hand him a script and then read her lines out loud while he read all the others.

"I watched my mother act all my life, and yet I wasn't attracted to acting as such," he recalls. "What attracted me was my mother's effort, her dedication, the seriousness of the work, the desire to do something. But what that something was didn't matter to me. It could just as well have been painting or writing or even rugby."

Nevertheless, at 41, Bardem finds himself one of the world's most admired actors, with one Oscar to his name – for best supporting actor in Joel and Ethan Coen's No Country for Old Men – and the possibility of another looming on the horizon. Leading directors regularly offer him juicy parts, and he has worked with many of the most distinguished names in film, including Pedro Almodovar, Woody Allen, Milos Forman and Terrence Malick.

But nothing, according to Bardem, has ever tested him – physically and mentally – or required greater effort and dedication more than Biutiful, a drama, directed by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, which won Bardem the best actor award when it was first shown at Cannes last May. "For me Biutiful is going to represent a before and after," he says when we meet in New York.

In Biutiful, set entirely in Barcelona, Bardem plays Uxbal, a petty criminal and doting father of two whose world, built around immigrant smuggling and the manufacture of fake luxury goods, begins to collapse when he learns he is seriously ill. Gonzalez Inarritu, whose previous films include 21 Grams and Babel, says he wrote the part specifically for Bardem, describing the actor as a man who combines "the primitive force of the minotaur" and "the sensibility of a poet".

Gonzalez Inarritu shoots his films with scenes in chronological order, unusual in the movie business, and has been known to demand 50 or more takes from his actors. Bardem knew that going into Biutiful but still found the process unusually exhausting, and not just because he injured his back and was in pain throughout the second half of the five-month shoot. Bardem often seems to be acting intuitively, but he describes his work as meticulously plotted in advance and in detail. Asked about a pair of especially moving moments in Biutiful in which his character, wrestling with mortality, does not speak at all, Bardem reaches for a sheet of paper and proceeded to diagram the stages into which he divided the two scenes.

"A character is like a building," he explains. "I've never studied architecture, but I imagine that first you have to prepare the plans, lay down the base, a solid base that has to do with the character, and from there build it up. Once this is all clear, you can add the details: I want blue walls, I want wood floors, I want him to speak this way or move like that. But first you have to think."

In a sense Bardem seems almost to have been predestined for a life as an actor. Both of his maternal grandparents were prominent actors, and one of his uncles, Juan Antonio Bardem, was a distinguished screenwriter and director (and Spanish Communist Party leader), perhaps best known for the film Death of a Cyclist.But Bardem tried at first to resist being pulled into the family trade. He played rugby as a boy, relentlessly and passionately, which gave him the broken bones to show for it and instilled the sense of teamwork that directors uniformly praise. When it came time to choose a career, he initially decided to go to art school, intending to become a painter.

To earn money for his studies he did small acting jobs on the side, adopting his mother's surname rather than that of his father, Encinas, as would have been more customary. But in his art classes he discovered that while he seemed to have talent, the only thing he wanted to draw was "faces, eyes, expressions and bodies," not landscapes or abstract works. He concluded that his primary interest really was how human beings express emotions. And at that point, around the age of 18, the Bardem family tradition, and all the years observing his mother, gave him something to draw on and inspire himself.

"I didn't like having to read the other characters," he recalled. "What fascinated me was listening to her. She'd have a great script with a monologue and would begin to speak and then stop and correct herself. She'd go back to the beginning, and that's the way it was for the entire work. So after an hour or so of the technical aspects, the memorisation, she would fly. She knew the text, she had control, the actress would appear, and off she would go."

The lesson he drew from that experience, he says, was that "to get to the art, one must work very hard". He adds: "Art doesn't exist just as talent. It exists as effort, work and judgment."

In keeping with that philosophy, Bardem says, nowadays he chooses roles based not on their size or the chances for acclaim they might offer, but on the degree of the challenge they present. That's the kind of thing that actors always say, of course. But Bardem's track record suggests he means it.

The director Fernando Leon de Aranoa, a friend of Bardem's, recalls: "When we were getting ready for Mondays in the Sun," a Spanish film about unemployed shipyard workers, "he had just been nominated for an Oscar for the first time, for Before Night Falls and every time his phone rang, it was with a proposal to be part of a production that, in terms of money and fame, was more important than mine. I thought it was logical that he would take one of those, but he said to me, 'I really like this character' and remained firm. That's an honesty that I like."

• Biutiful is released on 28 January