The Screen Addict | Bardem

I often find myself rooting for the bad guy in movies. I always felt that the writers of Die Hard (1988) gave Hans Gruber lines that were even snappier than those they wrote for John McClane. When I first saw The Terminator (1984), I was more intrigued by the unstoppable machine than by the hero who tried to kill it.

We love bad guys because they don’t have to abide by any rules, they have the coolest gadgets, and they always have a snappy comeback for whatever insult the hero throws at them.

Pablo Emilio Escobar Gaviria was a monster. The infamous Colombian narcotics-kingpin is tied to the death of over 8,000 people, many of which innocent civilians. Escobar wouldn’t hesitate to blow up a fully booked commercial flight if one of his enemies happened to be on board that plane.

But Escobar also appeals to the imagination. At the height of his “career”, the drug lord raked in around $60 million per day, which made him one of the richest men on the planet at the time.

What’s more – Escobar was insanely popular among the people of his native country Colombia, primarily because he used a significant chunk of his massive wealth to improve the living conditions of the less fortunate. One might even call him the Robin Hood of South America – if Robin Hood were a psychopathic gangster.

Escobar also inspires Hollywood. Ever since his death in 1993, Pablo has been a choice subject for many films and series. Veteran actors like Cliff Curtis and Benicio Del Toro played him in Blow (2001) and Paradise Lost (2014) respectively, and even Netflix jumped on the Escobar bandwagon with the much-lauded Narcos.

Is there really anything else to say about the character after all this exposure in film and beyond? I believe there is. It depends, of course, on what exactly is going to be said, and – perhaps even more importantly – who is going to say it.

When I visited the 69th edition of the Festival de Cannes back in 2016, I found an answer to these questions. Avi Lerner’s Millennium Media – the company that brought me tremendous success with the Expendables and Olympus Has Fallen franchises among other titles – announced they were going to produce their own version of the Escobar story.

Obviously, I too was a bit skeptical about yet another film about the drug lord. But when the producers told me their angle, I couldn’t help but get excited anyway. To portray a truly terrifying individual like Pablo Escobar, you need an actor that has proven he can be truly terrifying. Javier Bardem is that actor.

With unforgettable performances in films like No Country for Old Men (2007) – as the hair-raisingly harrowing hit-man Anton Chigurh – and Skyfall (2012) – as the brutal Bond-villain Silva – Bardem has definitively positioned himself as the ultimate Hollywood antagonist.

Aside from casting Bardem however, Millennium Media had another ace up their sleeves. The producers could have walked down the predictable path of just another story about drugs, money and violence and obviously, these elements are also present. But what makes the historical figure Pablo Escobar so intriguing, is that even a monster like him must have had some redeeming qualities.

Even drug lords fall in love, and that is why the story of Loving Pablo (2017) is told from the perspective of Virginia Vallejo, the reporter who was romantically involved with Escobar. The lovely added bonus here, is that Penélope Cruz – who is Bardem’s real-life wife – agreed to play Vallejo.

I had the distinct pleasure of talking to the producer and star of LP and pick his brain about the project. The picture I shared with this article sure proves that Bardem is a phenomenal actor, because it’s hard to accept a guy with a beaming smile like that in the part of a ruthless criminal…

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Twitter (X): Robin Logjes | The Screen Addict