In The Portfolio, Awards Insider speaks with some of this year’s most notable Oscar nominees about their entire body of nominated work. Today’s conversation is with best actor nominee Javier Bardem, an Oscar winner in supporting actor for No Country for Old Men who is nominated this year for Being the Ricardos. 

Javier Bardem attended the Oscar nominees luncheon for the fourth time this year, and for the first time in the company of his wife, Penélope Cruz, as a fellow nominee. But he still remembers, vividly, being the new kid in the room. “I remember absolutely feeling like a fish out of water,” he says of the 2001 event, the year he was nominated for best actor in Before Night Falls. “I remember the moment where we took the photo of the five nominees: Russell Crowe, Ed Harris, Geoffrey Rush, Tom Hanks, and me. What a bunch of people! And I was very intimidated, and I remember Tom Hanks being super warm, super nice, and making me feel at home. I will never forget that. That’s why Tom Hanks is Tom Hanks.”

Nominated this year for his role as Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos, Bardem has become a bit more comfortable being honored among his peers. Back in 2001, when Before Night Falls launched him into international stardom, he said, “awards remind you always that you are great. And if you believe that, you are dead as an actor.” Today, he says wryly, “I’m more at peace with that—because I know I’m fucking great now.”

Ahead, Bardem walks us back through his four Oscar nominations, the challenges that came with each of them, and why he still returns to his old acting coach to get where he needs to go.

Before Night Falls (2000)

The role of Cuban writer and exile Reinaldo Arenas was Bardem’s first major English–language part, and the one that introduced him—already fairly famous in Spain thanks to films like Jamón Jamón and Pedro Almodóvar’s *Live Flesh—*to a global audience. Brought in after another actor dropped out, Bardem dove headfirst into preparation, which he calls his favorite part of the process. “When you are preparing, you’re on your own, and you are mixing the elements, mixing the food in the kitchen,” he says. “That’s what makes it very special.”

Bardem, 31 at the time, won the best-actor prize at the Venice Film Festival when the Julian Schnabel—directed film premiered there in September 2000, though it was not his first experience winning an award. “When I was 24 I got a very important acting award at the San Sebastián Film Festival,” he says. “I started to cry and shake on the stage. I felt doomed by success. Like, No, I don’t need this now. I don’t want this now. It doesn’t help me to have this now. What helps is to have jobs, and learn, and fail, and stand up again, and keep on doing. It doesn’t help to be recognized with such an extraordinary award at this moment.”

He credits that desire for hard work to his mother, Pilar Bardem, “who was an actress and also a person with a lot of common sense and sensibility.” Watching her prepare for roles, he says, “I saw how hard she worked and how much respect she had for the craft and for the colleagues and for the process. I saw that since I was born, and I don’t understand it any other way.”

No Country for Old Men (2007)

How does an actor prepare to play someone who is not so much a person as a living embodiment of evil and chaos? For Bardem, the assignment of playing Anton Chigurh was “to erase, to undo…. I guess that took me to a place where it was kind of, I don’t know the word—neutrality? Not numbness, because the guy feels, but a way of coldness that will explain his absolute detachment with everything.”