Hispanic Actor Javier Bardem Walked Into Cannes and Said Everything Men Have Been Afraid to Admit About Machismo

Javier Bardem has spent decades playing men the world finds difficult to look away from, and his latest role may be the one that cuts closest to home. The Spanish actor is presenting his new film “El Ser Querido” at the Cannes Film Festival, and in the weeks surrounding its premiere he has been unusually candid about the cultural inheritance he believes shaped not only his generation but the character he plays on screen.

In an interview with Variety, Bardem reflected on what it meant to grow up male in Spain during the authoritarian regime of Francisco Franco, under which he was born in 1969, and on the assumptions about power and gender that came bundled with that upbringing. The conversation resonated well past the borders of Spain, touching something that communities across Latin America and the broader Hispanic world have been grappling with for generations. “We were educated in a culture that gave us everything we wanted, and we took for granted that we are much more powerful and that we have more control,” he said. “We are the driving force, as men. That is absolutely wrong in every sense.”

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A Culture That Travels

The particular brand of masculinity Bardem described is one that scholars, activists and families across the Spanish-speaking world would recognize immediately. Machismo, the deeply rooted belief system that positions male authority as natural and female deference as expected, did not stay contained within the Iberian Peninsula when millions of Latin Americans built their own societies across centuries of shared cultural and colonial history. It traveled with language, with religion, with family structure and with the unspoken rules that governed how men and women were supposed to occupy space in the world.

Latino communities in the United States have long contended with the way those inherited norms play out across generations, particularly as younger Latinos navigate the tension between the values they absorbed at home and the expectations of a broader culture that has been, however unevenly, reckoning with gender equality. The machismo that Bardem describes from his Spanish upbringing is the same force that Latino families across the Americas have been negotiating in kitchens, workplaces and community spaces for as long as anyone can remember, and his willingness to name it publicly, as a celebrated Hispanic man, carries a particular kind of cultural weight.

Bardem was born into Francoist Spain, a regime that enforced rigid gender roles as a matter of state policy and left a generation of men with an unexamined sense of entitlement that outlasted the dictatorship itself. The cultural pipeline between that Spain and the Latin American countries that share its language, its Catholicism and many of its social codes means that what Bardem describes as a specifically Spanish inheritance is also something far wider and more persistent across the Hispanic world.

A Character Who Mirrors a Generation

“El Ser Querido” is directed by Rodrigo Sorogoyen and co-written with Isabel Peña, and Bardem plays Esteban Martínez, a celebrated film director who works alongside his daughter in a relationship defined by its complexity and unresolved tensions. In one of the film’s central scenes, Esteban, a man who demands absolute professionalism from everyone around him, loses emotional control during a shoot conducted under the open sun.

Bardem described that scene as a direct window into something he recognizes from his own cultural context. The situation, he said, leads straight to the toxic masculinity of his generation and his age, which is his culture, which is Spain. He noted with visible pride that the only characters in the film who stand up to Esteban are women, a detail he clearly regards as one of the movie’s most purposeful choices.

The film arrives at Cannes at a moment when Bardem has been thinking seriously about the direction society is moving on questions of gender equality. “One of the things that worries me greatly is that we are going backwards,” he said, without ambiguity, and for Latino and Hispanic audiences who have watched hard-won conversations about gender equity lose ground in recent years, that observation is likely to land with particular force.

The Woman Who Showed Him Another Way

Bardem spoke at length about his mother, the actress Pilar Bardem, who died in 2021 and won a Goya Award in 1996, describing her as the counterforce that pulled him away from the machismo surrounding him during his formative years. “My mother fought very hard to find her own place and her dignity, and I venerate her,” he said. “I venerate her sacrifice, her love and her strength.”

Being an actress in Spain during the 1960s and 70s carried an enormous social stigma, and Bardem described his mother navigating that environment largely on her own after his parents separated when he was three years old, at a time when divorce was not yet legal in the country. He remembered his father as a domineering presence who ultimately paid a personal price for the way he occupied space in the world. “He was very imposing, and he suffered greatly because of it, because at the end of the day he was alone,” Bardem recalled.

The portrait he drew of his parents is one that will feel familiar to many Latino and Hispanic families, where the father who commands the room often does so at the cost of genuine connection, and where the mother absorbs the labor of keeping the family intact while the culture tells her she should be grateful for the arrangement. Bardem’s willingness to examine that dynamic in public, and to identify himself as someone who had to actively work against the lessons his culture tried to teach him, makes his commentary on machismo something considerably more personal than a celebrity opinion on a social issue.

Raising Children in the Age of the Algorithm

The conversation shifted toward the present when Bardem discussed his own children, a 15-year-old son and a 12-year-old daughter, and the particular challenges of parenting in an era defined by constant digital stimulation. His son received his first phone less than a year ago, with no access to social media, a decision Bardem and his wife, actress Penélope Cruz, made together as part of a broader approach to raising children who are capable of stillness.

“We try to make them understand the importance of being bored, of wasting time, of sitting down and staring at the ceiling,” Bardem said, describing deliberate idleness as a skill worth teaching in an environment that discourages it at every turn.

He extended that concern outward to describe what he sees as a generational shift in attention and patience. “The younger generation has less patience, less attention, less care for detail,” he said. “We all live at an accelerated pace, and it takes a great deal of courage to take the time to sit down and enjoy something for what it is, without thinking you are missing something else.”

For Latino and Hispanic families raising sons and daughters right now, Bardem’s observations sit at the intersection of two overlapping concerns: the old cultural scripts about masculinity that have not disappeared and the new digital environment that is writing its own rules about how men and boys are supposed to see themselves and the women around them. The combination, as Bardem frames it, demands active resistance rather than passive hope.

Bardem will bring all of that thinking with him when “El Ser Querido” screens in the official competition at Cannes, a festival where he has a long personal history. He served as a jury member in 2005 and won the Best Actor prize in 2010 for “Biutiful,” directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu. The film and the conversations surrounding it suggest that at this point in his career, Bardem is most interested in the roles that make him answer for the world he came from, and for the broader Hispanic world that shares that inheritance whether it has chosen to examine it or not.