Photo: Victor Bello / The Weinstein Company, 2008; Photo Illustration: Jamie Divecchio Ramsay

It’s fitting that Javier Bardem, still enjoying his work-free post-Oscar life, calls us from Barcelona: The city provides the setting for Woody Allen’s Vicky Cristina Barcelona, starring Bardem, Penélope Cruz and Scarlett Johansson. In Allen’s latest, Bardem plays a Spanish painter entangled in a love quadrangle with two American women and his ex, played by Cruz.

Time Out Chicago: When you and Penélope Cruz speak Spanish to each other in the film, you both visibly change. Are you a different actor in English?
Javier Bardem: We are all different in a foreign language. It’s about memory. When you are speaking your own tongue, a lot of images come to your mind, images of your own life. When you are speaking a foreign language, you don’t have many images.

TOC: The film has gotten flak for its tourist sensibility: a foreign country as a backdrop for Americans’ self-discovery. Any truth in that?
Javier Bardem: We want to think of ourselves as someone that can see the world beyond stereotypes, but we are not. This movie, because it’s done by Woody Allen and he’s a very intelligent man, he uses that stereotype to have a good laugh and to make us see how limited we are.

TOC: Speaking of stereotypes, though: You and Cruz play these very sexual, tempestuous Spaniards; the American women are naive, impressionable.
Javier Bardem: What [Allen] does, and why he’s a genius, he takes that and instead of going in the wrong direction, he has gone to common places and puts them in the pot together and laughs at them—American, Spanish, all of them. Behind those clichés, they are real people.

TOC: What did Allen give you that no other director has?
Javier Bardem: Speed. [Laughs] He goes fast, man. You can’t think twice. You have to go there and jump off the cliff, and that’s good. You are forced to have an action, to act.

TOC: There’s a debate about whether he recycles the same ideas. What does this film say about relationships that his other films haven’t?
Javier Bardem: There’s nothing left to be said, man.

TOC: An easy answer, don’t you think?
Javier Bardem: No, no, no, it’s not an easy answer because it’s not easy to say the same thing in a different way, and that’s the task for the artist. What this movie brings is a different way in the Woody Allen style about saying what’s the difference between common sense and passion. It’s very simple and very small, but it’s so big for everybody, no?

TOC: What have you found to be the toughest cross-cultural difference between Spain and the U.S.?
Javier Bardem: The idea of success is really strong in American culture. When you are not successful in the States, you are a failure, which is to say not only do you have to succeed, but you pay a price for it.

TOC: You’ve said that, after you shot a nude scene for No Country for Old Men, the crew quickly covered you up, but a scene in which you killed was met with excitement. What do you think about Americans’ relationship with violence?
Javier Bardem: Well, you have in the Constitution the right to hold a gun, and [Laughs] that’s it. “I don’t let anybody intrude or I have the right to kill him.” And that is really difficult to digest. Because that’s not only a personal matter; that’s something that comes to the high level of American government. It’s in the mentality.

TOC: Did playing the lover of your real-life girlfriend Cruz present a challenge?
Javier Bardem: Next question.

TOC: Okay. You’ve spoken out against the tabloid press, but isn’t that attention a minor cost of fame and wealth?
Javier Bardem: You know, I don’t want to waste my time talking about these things, either.

TOC: Okay. You’re the first Spanish actor to win an Oscar. What’s it like as a Spanish actor in Hollywood?
Javier Bardem: I never dreamed of working with the Coens, so it’s been kind of a dream, the whole thing. But I think that success—how do you say in English? Euphoric. The extreme emotions, you have to take them off your body as soon as you can. When you get an Oscar, you have to forget about it because it’s a great gift but it doesn’t explain anything.

TOC: Sounds like you read philosophy.
Javier Bardem: Well, no, not really.

TOC: What are you reading now?
Javier Bardem: I’m reading a book that—[Off the phone] ¿cómo se llama?—[Back on] it’s called The Schopenhauer Effect, a story about something we are all aware of, the need of understanding death itself.

TOC: Philosophy’s right there in the title.
Javier Bardem: Yeah. Yeah. Sadly.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona opens August 15.