He received nominations for the Academy Award for Best Actor for playing Reinaldo Arenas in Before Night Falls (2000), a criminal with cancer in Biutiful (2010), and Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos (2021).

His portrayal of assassin Anton Chigurh in the Coen brothers' western film No Country for Old Men (2007) won him the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

His mother, Pilar Bardem (1939–2021), was an actress, and his father, José Carlos Encinas Doussinague (1931–1995), was the son of a cattle rancher from the province of Salamanca.

[2][5] On his mother’s side, Bardem comes from a long line of filmmakers and actors dating back to the earliest days of Spanish cinema.

[15] In 1989, for the Spanish comedy show El Día Por Delante (The Day Ahead), he had to wear a Superman costume for a comedic sketch, a job that made him question whether he wanted to be an actor at all.

[14][20] His first English-speaking role came that same year, in with director Álex de la Iglesia's Perdita Durango, playing a santería-practicing bank robber.

After starring in about two dozen films in his native country, he gained international recognition in Julian Schnabel's Before Night Falls in 2000, portraying Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas.

[14][20] Bardem won Best Actor at the Venice Film Festival for his role in Mar Adentro (2004), released in the United States as The Sea Inside, in which he portrayed the quadriplegic turned assisted suicide activist Ramón Sampedro.

He stars in Miloš Forman's 2006 film Goya's Ghosts opposite Natalie Portman, where he plays a twisted monk during the Spanish Inquisition.

[30][31] Bardem was originally cast to play fictional filmmaker Guido Contini in the film adaptation of the Broadway musical Nine but dropped out due to exhaustion.

[33] He went on to star alongside Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson in Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008) where he earned his fourth Golden Globe Award nomination.

[34][35] He won his 5th Goya Award, this time for Best Actor in Biutiful, dedicating the win to his wife, Penélope Cruz, and newborn son.

[36][37] Around this same time, he was offered the lead role of "Gunslinger" Roland Deschain in Ron Howard's film adaptation of Stephen King's Dark Tower novels.

[38] With Universal deciding not to go forward with the ultra-ambitious adaptation of the 8-novel Stephen King series, and to end months of speculation, Bardem officially confirmed his role in Skyfall during an interview with Christiane Amanpour for ABC's Nightline.

[44] Bardem portrayed the main antagonist, Armando Salazar, in 2017's Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, the fifth film in the series.

[50][51] His leading performance portraying a manipulative factory boss was considered among the finest of his career by critics, and clinched him a Goya Award.

[50][51] Also in 2021, he starred as Desi Arnaz, alongside Nicole Kidman as his on-screen wife Lucille Ball, in Amazon Studios' and Aaron Sorkin's Being the Ricardos.

[61][62][63] In 2024, Bardem reprised the role of Stilgar in Dune: Part Two and he will also work once again with Kidman in the upcoming Netflix and Skydance Animation film, Spellbound.

[64][65] On 10 July 2023, Deadline announced that Bardem will star with Brad Pitt in F1 for Apple TV+, with Warner Bros. Pictures handling theatrical distribution.

[66] In September 2024, during the reception of his 2023 Donostia Award for career achievement at the 72nd San Sebastián International Film Festival, answering a question about his availability to Spanish filmmakers other than his friend Fernando León, Bardem announced that he had been cast to star alongside Victoria Luengo in Rodrigo Sorogoyen's The Beloved, due to begin filming in January 2025 in Fuerteventura.

[73] In September 2018, at the Toronto Film Festival premiere of Everybody Knows Bardem told Ikon London Magazine about acting together with his spouse: "I find it very easy.

[80] Despite the villainous characters he has played throughout his acting career, Bardem has a self-confessed "hatred" of violence which stems from a fight in a nightclub in his early twenties which left him with a broken nose.

[81] Long committed to the plight of the Sahrawi people, Bardem served as spokesperson of the platform 'All with the Sahara', that collected signatures to ask the Spanish government to "lead the search for a peaceful and just solution to a conflict that affects us directly".

[84] In July 2019, Bardem signed a manifesto urging PSOE and Podemos parties to reach an agreement to form a ministry after the April 2019 elections in Spain.