Javier Bardem on the 'Cape Fear' finale and reinventing Max Cady for the digital age
This is read by an automated voice.Please report any issues or inconsistencies here.
See more from the L.A.Times in Google Search.
Set us as preferred Alone and engulfed in the darkness of a Madrid cinema, Javier Bardem watched Martin Scorsese’s 1991 psychological thriller “Cape Fear” after learning he’d be starring in an episodic reimagining of the crime saga for Apple TV — the series finale is now streaming.He arranged the private screening to symbolically request Robert De Niro’s blessing to play the dangerously charismatic Max Cady, an ex-con parched for revenge against those who had a hand in his imprisonment.De Niro received an Oscar nomination for that role.“It was my way of honoring the work he did back then and, at the same time, to detach myself from that performance and ask his permission to create my own take,” Bardem tells me in Spanish while sitting at a restaurant inside a Beverly Hills hotel.His informal getup, a T-shirt and shorts, contrasts with the elegant environment primed for business lunches and ostentatious dinners.
He exudes an easy-going air.A quintessential cool dad casually sipping on an iced Diet Coke as he shares anecdotes about his passion for acting.The Apple TV series remake about a psychopath seeking revenge on a lawyer, played this time by Amy Adams, nods to its predecessors while including new twists.Bardem, 57, agreed to play Cady because the version of the character that the show’s creator, Nick Antosca, envisioned was not only decidedly distinct from those embodied by De Niro and Robert Mitchum, the latter of whom starred in a 1962 film adaptation, but also tailored to him as a Spanish man.Had it been a standard remake, Bardem would have passed.
Still, like the films, the show also “drinks from the fountain” of John D.MacDonald’s 1957 novel “The Executioners.” What remains intact across all versions of Cady is a devilish sense of humor and a lack of self-importance.
In any of his iterat...