Javier Bardem: I don’t know, I’m always saying, because I’ve been asked this question, as you can imagine.  And I’ve said that it was nine months of tension, I mean, pleasurable, and I feel truly thankful and honored, really thankful and grateful for the recognition.  But I guess when you come to the Oscar night, you come with a lot of things on your back.  It’s been month of tension – of promoting – of being eight of nine months out of your home, speaking a foreign language, being in No Man’s Land, in the sense of, “Where am I?”  And you are like out in space.  And then everything comes to that very night and when it happens, you feel like – [SIGH] – a lot of things come to an end.  And that’s why people get so emotional.  And that’s why the value of the statue itself is so big, because it represents a lot of things.  Six months later you have that golden bald man there.  And you look at it and what I feel is like,  thankful, grateful and lucky that I won the lottery, that I truly won the lottery. That it was my name and not another actor’s name that was in that envelope because who knows what?  Really.  Because it can’t measure any kind of talent because the talent of all of those actors there is un-measurable.  You can not measure.  I can’t compare to me.  I can’t compare to them.  But I won the lottery. 

But in terms of your career, aren’t you getting scripts that you wouldn’t of maybe gotten?

Javier Bardem: I guess that’s why you do it.  I mean, when you decide to go and move forward with it and say, okay, there’s a moment when you think: “There’s a possibility.”  Do you want to make the campaign?  And you go for it.  It’s not because you feel, there might be people who feel that way.  I don’t.  It’s not because you feel, “I need to be recognized.  I need to be the best one.”  No.  Fuck that.  That’s impossible.  That’s absurd.  It’s because you realize that this is a job that you’re doing.   You’re hired for doing a job.  If you are lucky enough, you need to be hired to keep on doing jobs.  This is a job like any other regular job.  And you need people to hire you.  And if you get that thing, theoretically, you’re going to be more hired.  Is that true?  And that’s why you make the decision, I think.  Is that true?  Well, yes.  After that I have more offers.  Some of them are more interesting, but you keep on doing more or less what you’ve been doing so far which is choosing carefully.  You know, when you choose something, it’s because you want to tell that story not because you need to do it in order to achieve something else.

But going into the Oscars, you were like the totally the favorite.  What kind of pressure is that – knowing that everybody is expecting your name to be in the envelope?

Javier, Spanish families can be very traditional and I know that you come from a family with actors, did you feel pressure because of your family to go into it as a young man or did you just always want to?

Javier Bardem: No, I felt lost. Like any kid of 12, 13 years old and you don’t know what to do and then you go to the theater to see your mother performing and you see the theater from the inside and you go, “This is crazy.”  I mean, my mother was shaking and nervous because it was the night of the opening, here,  and then she’s dressed like a queen and she’s on stage being the queen of Spain or portraying one of the queens of Spain.  And she’s like a queen and you go, “What happened in the middle?  This is crazy.”  But there’s something there that you smell that you go, “Wow, there’s something there that’s important.”  You don’t know what important is, but you realize later – important to yourself.  Because you’re really put in some plays where it’s not common, some place where you have to really look inside of you in order to pull a lot of triggers.  You know?  It’s like here I am a human being.  Here, I am a character.  And it happens in two and that is kind of crazy but it’s very rich for one personality to go through that process.

So watching your Mom made you want to do what she was doing?

Javier Bardem: Yeah, I guess.  I saw all of that since I was little and wanted to do it.  But I saw also the bad times.

After winning the Oscar this year, when did you decide to drop off the project with Coppola and Rob Marshall?