Actors find inspiration in hair, hats and sweater vests.
An actor's job is to defend his character, to find the emotional resonance driving that person and stay always in his story, no personal judgments allowed. The best of them pull from deep inside themselves to become another person. But, sometimes, they get a little help. Sometimes, it's not so inside-out. The addition of, say, a hat or a wig or a prop can give an actor that little external nudge to full understanding.
JAVIER BARDEM
On playing the lovelorn Florentino Ariza in "Love in the Time of Cholera" and the psychopath Anton Chigurh in "No Country for Old Men")
"In 'Cholera,' I was always working with something private, something smelly, like flowers, tea leaves, coffee beans. I was always carrying those things in my hands," he says, sniffing the imaginary objects in his fingertips, "in order to open the instincts. Because it's about a guy who is really open to Fermina's essence everywhere. He's trying to capture where she is, like a dog. No? So I was always wearing those things put in my jacket, it was a private kind of thing. Some cologne. Some vanilla leaves. Something pleasant, sensual.
"In "No Country," the hair helped me tremendously. Because when the hair is put together by the hair stylist [Paul Leblanc] and I see myself in the mirror, there's something that really puts you like -- in some other place.
"The haircut came out of the blue. It was the Coens' idea, I wasn't expecting it. It was part of the physical transformation. That was the only thing that has to tell us this guy is out of sync, this guy has a problem, this guy is walking down the street with a very ancient kind of haircut that is truly, like, weird. And also mechanical, mathematical almost, like everything has to be in place, which gives you the idea of a very kind of mathematical mind where click click, everything has to be in order.
"The rest has to be totally numb. Kind of one piece of a man. I never in the movie move this, the hip. I turn like one piece, cluck, cluck, cluck, you know? And the haircut was really doing the job, so you don't have to act the haircut; the haircut is acting by itself. Which is like, 'Wow, what is that? That's weird.' So you don't have to play weird if you have that weird haircut."
