Rise to Fame
Spanish cinema already knew him, but the rest of the world didn't until he played a Cuban poet dying of AIDS in Before Night Falls, earning a Best Actor Oscar nomination. No Spanish actor had made that list before. Then came Anton Chigurh. The Coen Brothers cast him as a hitman with a cattle gun and a bowl cut in No Country for Old Men, and he turned a character without apparent motive into something genuinely terrifying. He won Best Supporting Actor in 2008, the first Spanish actor to take home an acting Oscar, and he has said the Coens were 'crazy enough' to put 'one of the most horrible haircuts in history' on his head.
In the Spotlight
Nearly two decades after the Oscar, he's still booking prestige work without seeming to chase it. Dune: Part Two put him back in blockbuster territory as Stilgar, and Netflix's Monsters earned him two Emmy nominations for playing patriarch José Menendez. The Brad Pitt racing drama F1 follows in 2025. He lives in Spain with Penélope Cruz and their two kids, doesn't drive, and calls himself a 'worker' rather than an actor. For someone who treats Hollywood like a contractual obligation, the bookings keep coming.
Side Notes
He has said he got into acting to pay for painting supplies. Four years at Madrid's art school left him thinking of himself as a painter first, and acting roles were just how he kept the brushes stocked. The family dynasty, three generations deep in Spanish cinema, apparently wasn't the draw. He learned English almost entirely through AC/DC. He's spent years working with Sea Shepherd on marine conservation, which is probably not what Francis Ford Coppola had in mind when he called him an improvement on Pacino, Nicholson, and De Niro.