“I listen to Slipknot to go to sleep!”: Javier Bardem’s lifelong love of metal

There are scenes in the new Apple TV remake of Cape Fear in which Javier Bardem looks so, so metal. Long hair, absolutely ripped, covered in tattoos, growling. Like, how much more metal could he look? The answer’s none. None more metal.

“We absolutely went for a metal look,” Javier tells Kerrang!. “I loved that.”

Javier is the third screen incarnation of hell-bent, vengeance-obsessed psychopath Max Cady, previously portrayed by screen greats Robert Mitchum and Robert De Niro, and the extra runtime of the 10-part Apple TV version gives the character a lot more depth. This Max is at times charming, at times completely terrifying. It’s a perfect role for Javier, whose career contains equal parts dashing romantic leads and complete monsters. And it’s a performance fuelled in-part by the music the lifelong metalhead was listening to on-set.

“I listened to five songs especially,” he says. “Two from Linkin Park: Given Up, with the great Chester, and Up From The Bottom from the last album, From Zero. I think [Emily Armstrong] is an amazing singer. She really brought it back. Those two songs really express frustration and the fight for raising up from [one’s] own ashes that [resonates] with Max. And songs by Slipknot, Falling In Reverse and Bad Omens. I’m so bad with the names of songs, but they were in my head all day long before doing anything and helped put me in the mood.”

However, Javier points out, while there are elements of the music he loves that can help inform his character choices, his listening habits just happened to line up perfectly for this project. He’d be blasting that stuff anyway.

“It's not that I use the music,” he says. “It's that I can't live without it. It's what I listen to: when I drive, when I’m being driven, before I go to sleep…”

He chuckles. “Yeah, I listen to Slipknot to go to sleep. For me, metal is… a way of living.”

Javier, it’s fair to say, gets it. In the past he’s credited Pearl Jam with helping him learn English. He pops up in Iron Maiden’s recent documentary Burning Ambition rhapsodising about his love of Bruce and the boys. Last year a clip of him rocking out on his own in the VIP section of a Judas Priest show went viral – he later explained none of his friends could make it, but he wasn’t going to let that stop him having a good time.

“I'm a huge, huge fan of live concerts,” he says. “I’ve been to a lot, and usually go whenever I can. Sometimes I go to the pit if I can make it, but otherwise I'm privileged enough to enjoy it from a place where I can be left alone. But whether it's one place or the other, I feel it.”

It’s a fun thought, that the next time you’re in the pit you might look up and find yourself face-to-face with Anton Chigurh, the terrifying killer from from No Country For Old Men, going absolutely apeshit. Doesn’t that occasionally bring the pit to a halt, as everyone stops to go, ‘Hang on, that’s the guy from Dune!?’

“Yeah,” he concedes, “but people are used to it. I went to the Power Trip festival especially to see the first AC/DC concert in so many years, the PWR/UP tour. And I was in the pit and people went, ‘Oh!’, but they leave you alone. [It’s just] ‘Hey, welcome! Great!’ I love that. That's brotherhood. ‘I know why you are here and I'm not going to fuck with that. You enjoy your thing. Let's enjoy it together.’ You don’t feel that in many other music styles, you know? There’s too much [miming taking a selfie]. In heavy metal and hard rock, people are listening to the music.”

Javier’s life in metal started back in his native Spain at the tail end of the 1970s, when his older brother Carlos (also an actor) brought home an album by five scruffy, beer-swilling Australians.

“I was 10 years old and my brother brought the [AC/DC] album Highway To Hell. He played it to me, and that was the end of it. That was the end of childhood and the beginning of manhood. I just thought, ‘All right, I get it!’ And then from there, I went back to Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin... My brother quit, but I was like, ‘I'm following this.’”

Four-and-a-half decades later, he’s still happily living in the metal world, putting his superstar status to good use by getting into shows and bigging up his favourite bands at every opportunity.

“It's a way of feeling,” he says. “It's a way of belonging to a community of people. It’s what I like. And the older I get, the more I like it, and the less I like the other options. I think I can listen to anything, because I really respect music and musicians. But the thing that makes my heart beat is metal.”

In one earlyish scene in Cape Fear, Javier's Max Cady takes the mic at a fundraising benefit and delivers a lengthy, eloquent, moving speech about pain, death, fingers and toes. He’s in the middle of a huge room, commanding everyone’s attention. As a rock fan, did he take any inspiration from the Dickinsons, Halfords and Taylors of the world? No, it turns out.

“That scene was the first day of shooting for me on the whole show,” he says. “I was like, 'Wow, what a baptism of fire'. So how do you do it? You just do it. Go there and say, 'Okay, I know I'm going to fuck it up, but it's moviemaking'. Hopefully they’ll take the good takes and put it together. It feels weird to be in the spotlight. It's funny because I am in the spotlight a lot, but to be in the spotlight with all the actors looking at you on your first day, that's brutal.”

The torso full of eyeball, heart and dagger tattoos Bardem sports in Apple TV’s show is far from the first time he’s been heavily physically transformed for a role. It ranges from a pipe up his nose in Dune to the world’s most terrifying haircut in No Country For Old Men; a decomposing face in Pirates Of The Caribbean to missing large parts of his skull while terrorising James Bond in Skyfall. All of which is to say, he’d fit in perfectly as a masked member of Slipknot…

“Oh yeah!” he laughs. “I played a heavy metal drummer in a short film [Look At Me] directed by Sally Potter, with Chris Rock... That's the closest I've come to playing a rock star. For that role in particular, I was listening nonstop to Motörhead: it was more of an '80s kind of vibe, and Lemmy is always a good voice to go back to.”

Nodding off to Slipknot, going nuts solo to Judas Priest, bringing elements of Linkin Park to a his roles and channeling his inner Lemmy: you wouldn’t want to meet the real Max Cady, but running into the dude behind him in a loud beery pit? Hell yeah.

The first two episodes of Cape Fear are out now on Apple TV, with new episodes coming every Friday to July 31.

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